Using Xcode 27's Agent Skills in Claude, Codex, and Cursor - SwiftLee

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SwiftLee > AI Development > Using Xcode 27’s Agent Skills in Claude, Codex, and Cursor

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Apple launched Xcode 27 during WWDC’26, introducing a bunch of agentic development improvements, including official agent skills. As you’ve learned from my 9-Step Framework for Choosing the Right Agent Skill, it’s important to pick skills from authoritative sources. Apple absolutely counts like one, of course!

Official Agent Skills will impact how we build apps, whether with the new Xcode or with existing IDEs like Claude, Codex, or Cursor. I’ve earlier launched a SwiftUI Agent Skill to build better views with AI, but I’m honestly super happy to see an official alternative today.Stop configuring MCPs in every AI appUsing RevenueCat, Sentry, Linear, GitHub, Supabase, or Astro with Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex? MCP Beast gives your iOS stack one private MCP gateway on your Mac. Connect each server once, keep credentials in macOS Keychain, and let every AI client use the same trusted endpoint. Download MCP Beast for free.

Exporting Agent Skills to use with 3rd party IDEs

While the Agent Skills are already available in Xcode 27, you might want them to be available globally. Whether you use Codex, Claude, Cursor, or any other IDE that supports Agent Skills.

As part of the many improvements to Xcode, the team also introduced a new CLI tool called agent:

Xcode’s agent CLI that comes with a new Agent Skills export command.

While the CLI is primarily focused on the Model Context Protocol that ships with Xcode, it now also lets you export the Agent Skills that come with Xcode.

Here’s how you can export the Xcode 27 Agent Skills to use in Claude, Codex, Cursor, or any other IDEs: Open the Terminal.app<br>Execute the command xcrun agent skills export ~/.agents/skills Many popular Agent IDEs support the ~/.agents/ folder to discover Agent Skills.<br>Open your Agent IDE, refresh the skills if needed. If the skills don’t shop up, relaunch the IDE.

After you’ve successfully exported the agent skills, you’re ready to use them inside any IDE of your choice. For example, here’s the autocomplete inside Cursor:

Xcode’s 27 Agent Skills are available inside the Cursor prompt field.

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The Agent Skills that ship with Xcode 27

After you’ve executed the command in the terminal, you’ll notice which Agent Skills are currently available inside Xcode 27. Important note: not all of these skills are useful outside of Xcode (more on this later).

avanderlee@AJs-MacBook-Pro MacOS % xcrun agent skills export ~/.agents/skills<br>Exported 7 skills to /Users/avanderlee/.agents/skills<br>✓ uikit-app-modernization<br>✓ device-interaction<br>✓ swiftui-whats-new-27<br>✓ swiftui-specialist<br>✓ test-modernizer<br>✓ c-bounds-safety<br>✓ audit-xcode-security-settings

You might get enthusiastic by reading just the names, but let’s also dive into a bit more details on what each does.

uikit-app-modernization<br>Modernizes UIKit apps for multi-window environments by replacing legacy shared-state APIs like UIScreen.main and interfaceOrientation. Handles scene lifecycle migration and asymmetric safe area insets across both Swift and Objective-C codebases.

device-interaction<br>Verifies your app’s behavior on a real device or simulator using screenshots, UI hierarchy inspection, and synthesized touch interactions. Runs as a subagent to confirm that features actually work and to catch visual or functional bugs.

swiftui-whats-new-27<br>Documents the new SwiftUI APIs, behaviors, and deprecations introduced across the 2027 OS releases (iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS 27). Covers the @State macro migration, drag-to-reorder, new toolbar APIs, swipe actions, document-based apps, and other source-incompatible changes.

swiftui-specialist<br>Provides Apple’s authoritative best practices and idiomatic patterns for writing, reviewing, and refactoring SwiftUI code. Covers view structure, data flow, environment usage, modifiers, localization, animations, ForEach identity, and soft-deprecated APIs.

test-modernizer<br>Migrates existing XCTest suites to Swift Testing and restructures older Swift Testing code to...