Everything that happened on github.com/Cocoanetics since the SwiftText post — and it’s more than I expected to fit into three weeks: a foundation package that didn’t exist on June 23 and now carries three protocols, SwiftMCP turned inside out, two brand-new projects, releases across the whole mail stack — and a very welcome comeback doing the final polish.
Read moreIt started with a bedtime problem.
There’s a manuscript on my disk — a middle-grade fantasy a young writer in the house has been drafting. Fifteen chapters and a prologue, all in Markdown. The ask was simple and entirely reasonable: could it be a real PDF, the kind you can hold, with every chapter starting on a fresh page like a proper book?
So I asked for exactly that. One sentence. A minute later there was a 152-page PDF, each chapter opening at the top of its own page, plus a little shell script I could re-run whenever the draft changed. It changed three times that evening.
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Everything that happened on github.com/Cocoanetics since the SwiftCross post (June 2 – June 13, 2026). Four new kits, a fourteen-year-old flagship that came home, and the stretch where the extraction pattern started shipping to users.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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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 moreMy last update post was just two weeks ago, but the pace hasn’t slowed down. If anything, it’s accelerated. The common thread? Real problems encountered while building real things — my client project, the Post mail daemon, and a surprise from Apple that I’ll get to at the end.
Read moreInstead of writing blog posts about individual package updates, I think I’ll be changing things up a bit. My agents do a better job than me in summarizing the changes for individual releases, so I will from now on group them together, referencing the release notes on GitHub.
Read moreLicense:
