Only of interest to those who do or at least dabble in app development with Xcode, but this was quite a shock when I first opened Xcode today (quoting here from Chat-GPT inside Xcode)
About “Codex is no longer available” in Xcode
You’re seeing that message because Apple has retired the old “Codex” coding assistant integration in Xcode. In current Xcode versions (you’re on 26.x), Codex has been replaced by Apple’s newer, built‑in AI coding experience that’s powered by Apple Intelligence and on‑device Foundation Models (where available). The goal is to provide a more private, integrated assistant across code completion, inline suggestions, refactoring help, and explanations—without the separate “Codex” branding.
Color me less than thrilled. Ironically, the first task on my to-do list for a project I’m working on was to tell Codex to remove the Foundation Model (i.e., Apple Intelligence) based approach to generating a very small paragraph of text for display to the user that we had been working on for a few days. AI™ could never get it right, no matter how much we tried to constrain its hallucinations. Now Apple is trying to convince me that those same models can take the place of Codex?
A few folks have looked at this thread, so I thought I’d post a follow-up for those interested/in the same boat. And thanks to @ace for fixing the title–Codex is not dead, Apple just kicked it out of the Xcode playground for reasons known only to them.
So the next logical step was to try the default alternative, ChatGPT in Xcode. This was…well, not a disaster, but really, really painful. It has a very limited project context compared to Codex, could only see a few files that you explicitly named, or had open in Xcode when you gave your prompt. This meant it could (and in fact, did) make errors due to this narrow view of your project. It’s just not a fit for an agent inside an IDE.
Instead, I am now trying Claude Agent in Xcode. Still early days, but…wow! What a difference. I’d say better than Codex in Xcode already. Much more comprehensive in terms of laying out an approach to a problem, applying a fix (or addition) that fits with the entire project. It can even automatically commit the changes and synthesize a git commit message that’s really good.
If this holds, it looks like goodby OpenAI, hello Anthropic for me. Would love to hear others’ experiences.
I have been using the Codex desktop app, which can freely interact with an XCode project. Granted, it’s an extra window to switch back and forth between, but it works reasonably well for me.
Thanks, Dan. I might have to check that out before I cancel my OpenAI subscription. Like you say, it’s an extra window, and inside Xcode Claude is currently doing better (for me) than Codex did, but who’s to say Apple won’t kick Claude out of the sandbox next?
