Is Xcode Intelligence Ready for Production? My Experience and a Quest for Better Tools

I am looking to optimize my AI-assisted workflow within Xcode.

Previously, my process was inefficient:

  1. Manually selecting and copying code snippets from Xcode into Gemini.

  2. Asking a specific question (e.g., "Modify this to show an alertError message box").

  3. Copying the result back into Xcode.

I attempted to switch to the new native Intelligence feature in Xcode to streamline this, but I found significant shortcomings:

  1. Latency: The response time is noticeably slow. Much slower than asking directly on Gemini 3 Pro.

  2. Lack of Context: The AI often fails to grasp the full project context. For example, it frequently claims it cannot see the code for ScannerView even though it is part of the project. I often have to prompt it multiple times before it finally "finds" the file.

Is Xcode's Intelligence feature actually production-ready yet?

If not, what tools do you recommend that integrate well with iOS development?

To be clear, I am not looking for "vibe coding." I have a clear grasp of the problem and the high-level solution. My goal is to delegate the low-level implementation to the AI. I need a tool that has full project context from the start, eliminating the need to manually copy-paste snippets into a chat window.

Latency is bad — I'm seeing 20+ minutes for simple responses. This is on a relatively low-end machine for Mac development (8-core Intel i9 w/64Gb RAM), but the AI is being done elsewhere, so I don't think that explains it.

I've been reasonable satisfied with the Swift code that the system is providing, but the speed is not competitive.