Things are moving quite fast with coding agents. Years ago, it took companies weeks or months of work to adopt generated projects. Now, they can do it in hours and see their productivity boosted significantly. How crazy is that?
Coding agents have had a significant impact on Tuist’s ability to continually improve the product. Most of our code is written by coding agents these days. We can ask codex or claude to reproduce an issue you’ve reported, or just use the reproduction project you shared and come up with a fix that we can review and merge. Some issues that would have taken us days to fix in the past now take minutes. Compilation and CI time are becoming a bottleneck for us, which is actually a good thing. As good itch scratchers as we are, it means we’ll pour mental energy into overcoming those shortcomings and share what we learn with all of you. Coding agents help us channel our mental energy into solving the problems and challenges you face, rather than into executing them. Our codebases are mature and have well-defined frameworks that the agents can follow. In Elixir, which we use for the server, the functional nature of the language helps coding agents reason about the code quite well. On the Swift side, agents are helping us iterate on our modularization to further benefit from our own optimizations, and also take Swift to new platforms like Linux, where we’ll soon expand. And talking about Android, we’ll be able to roll out the first Android support for binary caching and insights in a matter of weeks. That would have been unthinkable years ago.
If you are not yet trusting these tools, I’d recommend taking a leap of faith with an open mind and letting agents write code for you. It feels uncomfortable at first. You’ll find yourself guiding your agent and likely increasing your concurrency, but over time, you’ll gain a mental bandwidth that you can apply to creative tasks where agents are not yet strong. If you use Tuist, you can pull the sources locally to contribute ideas, fixes, and improvements. Once you clone the repo, agents will guide you through the codebase, help you understand it, and help you add the features you need. This is how we work, and it’s not limited to us. You can do it too.
With code getting cheaper and faster to produce, two things follow for Tuist. First, compilation and test times will become the bottleneck, and that presents us with a great opportunity. Our belief is that build systems will evolve to overcome the compute ceiling of modern hardware by leaning on network and caching capabilities, and we’ll build the infrastructure to support that. In other words, we are building infrastructure for productive agentic engineering. Second, we are becoming an infrastructure company, and coding agents are not great at building infrastructure like ours, which is a distributed system. They can reason with you about architecture and patterns, but the behavior of distributed services emerges from the interaction between components, something that’s hard to capture in a local development loop or a model’s context window. We’ll build the best infrastructure and go deep and wide into every toolchain and ecosystem to help it advance for this modern world. This is not the sexiest pitch for businesses. It means community work with no direct financial return. We see things differently. We want Xcode’s tooling to get better. Also Gradle’s, Elixir’s, and Bazel’s. We don’t have the muscle for all of those today, but we’ll build it over time. Those tools getting better also means us bringing more awesomeness to our users.
Through the Apple ecosystem, we learned the amount of resources that companies waste due to unproductive setups, and we discovered a new market to unlock. While working on it, the rise of coding agents made this problem more apparent and more painful, so the need for something like Tuist is more pressing than ever. All of a sudden, we found ourselves with an opportunity to enable productive agentic engineering with what makes us truly special: a passion for community and openness that will help us shape the best solution out there.