Ad

Our DNA is written in Swift

Jump

Swift Cross Platform

Jun 02, 2026

My passion for cross platform software development started around the year 2000 when I saw how a contractor at Austria’s Connect Austria – which eventually became the cellular network provider DREI – would create C++ utilities on PC with Visual Studio that then could be compiled and run in production on Compaq Tru64 Unix. I have fond memories of writing a lot of small CLI utilities the same way to solve data issues we encountered processing call record data for billing.

I always hated the approach of emulating a virtual machine to get code running of different platforms. This feels to me like watching the trojans celebrate their big wooden horse and nobody willing to listen to me shouting warnings of what ugliness might be inside.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

Agentic Bash

May 21, 2026

The components I’ve been announcing recently certainly hinted at what I’m working on at the moment. A bash playground that lets me exercise SwiftBash, SwiftScript and SwiftPorts all tied together via ShellKit. There was one part that was on my private repo: the agentic harness and pure Swift wrappers for OpenAI APIs. I kept thinking that if I wanted to eventually make my Bash Playground public, then I needed to also have this final part on GitHub as well.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

My Outer Loop

May 09, 2026

There is a thing that happens, after a couple of weeks of working with coding agents at a steady pace, where you stop thinking of yourself as the person typing and start thinking of yourself as the person seeing. The Latin word for vision is visio, “I see”; the Italian visione and English vision both keep that. It’s a much older idea than the modern “mission statement on a slide” usage. It means: I have, in my head, a picture of where this should go.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

Look What JavaScriptCore Has Been Doing in My Pocket

May 08, 2026

I’ll be honest. When I started thinking about which other languages SwiftBash should run, JavaScript was about fifth on my list. I’m a Swift person. I’m a Cocoa person. I’m somewhere between indifferent and faintly hostile to npm. The idea of “let’s drop a Node-compatible runtime into the bash shell” sounded exactly like the kind of project I would shake my head at on someone else’s GitHub.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

Introducing SwiftPorts

May 06, 2026

When I was building SwiftBash I made surprisingly quick headway on the basic CLI utilities — jq, awk, sed, grep. Each one is a small, well-scoped language, and once you sit down with the spec it really is just a parser and an evaluator.

Then I hit a wall. The two CLIs I reach for most as a working developer aren’t tiny languages — they’re gh and glab, the GitHub and GitLab clients. And right next to them, the granddaddy of all dev CLIs: git. These aren’t 2,000-line tools. gh alone is roughly fifty thousand lines of Go, with subcommand trees, OAuth flows, REST + GraphQL clients, pagination, archive extraction, jq filtering — the works. Reimplementing all of that by hand felt like a year of evenings.

But the source code is right there on GitHub. And I have a coding agent. So I began to wonder: shouldn’t Opus 4.7 1M (extra-high) be able to translate cli/cli into Swift for me, given the original as ground truth?

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

An Interpreter for Swift

May 02, 2026

A few days ago I introduced SwiftBash — a sandboxed bash interpreter written in pure Swift. At the end of the four-green-checkmarks post I promised the next instalment would be about something else: SwiftScript, the same idea but for Swift itself.

It’s exactly that. Real Swift syntax, walked by a tree-walking interpreter, no LLVM, no codegen, no Process/fork/exec — meant for the places where Swift as a compiled binary isn’t an option.

After this success with an AST for bash, I figured, let’s up the game and try the same with Swift Syntax. My Claude Opus has proven time again that it has the necessary tenacity to make any stupid idea come true.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

Four Green Checkmarks: GitHub CI for macOS, iOS, Linux, and Windows

Apr 30, 2026

A few hours again, four little checkmarks lit up next to a commit in SwiftScript‘s GitHub Actions:

That’s a Swift package — written in Swift, depending on swift-syntax, exposing a Swift API — building and running its full test suite on all four platforms Swift officially supports today.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

Introducing SwiftBash

Apr 27, 2026

Every coding agent I use — Claude Code, Codex, even PI — leans on the same tool: /bin/bash. PI in particular runs almost exclusively through bash, no sandbox in sight. There’s a good reason for that. Bash is one of the most heavily represented languages in any pre-training corpus on the planet, and LLMs write it fluently. If you give a model a file to manipulate, a folder to inspect, or a one-shot pipeline to assemble, the answer that falls out is almost always a few lines of shell.

The downside is the friction. Unless you live in YOLO mode, you spend half your day clicking Allow on find, grep, sed, and cat prompts. Codex in the cloud sidesteps this by spinning up a fresh container per task. On my Mac, both Codex and Claude Code happily edit my actual files — and even with git worktrees, I’ve ended up with stray uncommitted changes on main more than once.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

DTCoreText 2.0

Apr 19, 2026

15 years ago, I started my first open source project on GitHub. Originally it was called NSAttributedString-Additions-for-HTML but later I renamed it to DTCoreText. I had switched to maintenance mode 8 years ago, because I had no interest in putting more work into an Objective-C code base.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments

SwiftButler

Mar 30, 2026

Before I figured out how to use macros to enable SwiftMCP, I experimented a lot with SwiftSyntax and built a project that I called SAAE – Swift AST Abstractor & Editor. Such it lay forgotten on a public GitHub repo. So I figured, it would deserve a new coat of paint and a better name.

Read more

Read more

0 Comments