Claude drafts these delta posts, I edit them. They’re primarily for my own consumption.
Xcode 27 beta 5 (27A5237l) landed, so I re-ran the agent skill export for the snapshot repo. Every beta so far has been a tweak to skills that already existed. This one adds three new ones and about 5,200 lines (full commit). The supported export now vends 10 skills, up from 7, which makes 13 in the snapshot once you count the two translation skills and ios-dynamic-text that the export still can’t reach.
App Intents arrives as two skills rather than one. app-intents-specialist holds the evergreen traps. perform() is Sendable and not @MainActor. It is retriable, so irreversible work goes last. AppEnum raw values are persisted by string and must never be renumbered, and an unregistered @Dependency is a runtime fatalError. app-intents-whats-new-27 holds the version-gated surface across iOS 26 and 27, fourteen references covering supportedModes, SnippetIntent, Visual Intelligence queries, LongRunningIntent, EntityCollection, and the AppIntentsTesting framework. That is the same split the SwiftUI skills have had since beta 1, so the specialist plus what’s-new pairing seems to be a house pattern rather than a one-off. Neither skill is a relabelling of something already in the snapshot. Each shares under ten lines with the whole of beta 4, and those are boilerplate like var body: some View {. I can’t rule out that the text sat unvended inside the beta 4 bundle, since I no longer have that build to dig through.
The third new skill is building-document-based-swiftui-applications, which covers documents across three references of its own. In the same beta, swiftui-whats-new-27 lost its document-based-apps.md reference. It isn’t a straight move, though. I checked the text line by line, and only about a fifth of the new skill is carried over from the old reference, while roughly three fifths of the old reference didn’t survive at all. The skill says to always include undo registration in a document app example, because SwiftUI leans on the undo stack to detect unsaved changes, so autosave silently does nothing without it.
swiftui-whats-new-27 lost deprecations.md as well. The statusBarHidden deprecation it documented now turns up in the generated soft-deprecated list inside swiftui-specialist. Its description also got cut down from a single paragraph of roughly 250 words to a short bulleted one. swiftui-specialist got the same treatment. app-intents-specialist ships with a description longer than either of them was before the trim, though, so whatever guidance is driving the shorter ones doesn’t seem to have reached the new skills yet.
swiftui-specialist also picks up two bits of reference guidance that read like patches for things a model kept getting wrong. modifiers.md gains a section on AnyShapeStyle, telling the agent to erase to it rather than split a view into if/else branches when two ShapeStyle types won’t unify, and stating outright that it is “not the discouraged view type-erasure (AnyView)”. Then it immediately walks that back a step with a section headed “Do not assume a style ternary fails to compile from the style names alone”, listing ternaries that do compile and must be left alone. dataflow.md gets a matching correction about dressing an argument-less projection up as a subscript with a marker enum, when a computed property does the job.
device-interaction learns watchOS. The command table gains c <rotations> to turn the Digital Crown, where the sign sets direction and 1.0 is a full revolution, plus button presses for the crown, side button, and Action button. Device orientation is now marked iOS only, and the skill description drops “iOS app” for just “app”. The rule about never guessing coordinates from a screenshot has softened too. It is now a fallback you may reach for, but only after tapping a hitPoint and confirming it did nothing.
audit-xcode-security-settings gets attention for the third beta running. The single “Basic Clang safety warnings” plan item is now a group, splitting compiler warnings that fire on every build from static analyzer checkers and clang-tidy checks that only run during Build and analyze. Group headings lose their checkbox entirely, and the skill spells out why, saying it “avoids the ambiguity of a checked parent whose sub-items are all unchecked”. The plan file now also invites you to ask questions and have the plan expanded before you approve it.
The translation skill gained six English style guides, for en plus the AU, CA, GB, IN, and PH variants. The British one is a fun read. It wants -ise and -our spellings, tells you to drop the serial comma unless it prevents ambiguity, puts spaces around the em dash, and reminds you that the London dialling code is 020 and not 0207.
After three betas of tweaks to existing skills, Apple seem to have settled on what one of these skills looks like, and are now filling in frameworks.