Side Project Spotlight

Recorded thirty minutes after the WWDC26 State of the Union keynote ended, The Trio delivers a hot-take reaction to everything Apple just announced. Steve makes his boldest claim yet: 2026 is the year the "Universal UI" era begins, anchored by a Siri demo that appeared to actually work in real time. Xcode quietly Sherlocked the Codex app, SwiftUI got reorderable containers and (finally) AsyncImage caching, and Aaron spotted some very suspicious folding phone tea leaves in the new Simulator replacement.

## Chapters

00:08 Introductions

01:31 Reviewing The Trio's "Universal UI" Concept

02:39 Comparison of "AI" Apps: Siri, Claude, Codex, ChatGPT

05:43 Multimodal Prompts & Private Cloud Compute

07:26 Foundation Model Device Requirements

09:50 Dynamic Profiles and Custom Model Configurations

13:41 Xcode 27 Sherlocked the Codex App

15:42 Xcode and Developer Tool Evolution

21:47 SwiftUI Updates: Reordering and AsyncImage Cache

26:14 A Grab Bag of Random Stuff

28:23 App Actions and Siri Integration

35:04 No Apple Claw?

39:09 Swift Compiler Unable to Type Check Error

40:37 Final Impressions

42:02 Folding Phone Tea Leaves

43:07 Snow Leopard Speed Improvements

43:53 Wrap Up & One More Thing...

45:50 Tag

## Show Notes

- Steve declares 2026 the start of the "Universal UI era," with a live Siri demo that actually worked as his primary evidence.

- Aaron clocked the demo as mostly staring at a loading spinner; Steve argues Apple had to prove the on-device inference wasn't faked this time.

- The Foundation Models framework supports dynamic profiles: configurable system prompts, temperatures, and thinking budgets per scenario within a single app.

- Xcode 27 ships an agentic coding UI seemingly inspired by the Codex app, prompting Kotaro to ask point-blank: "Are you saying they Sherlocked Codex?"

- SwiftUI finally has a reorderable container, which The Trio immediately wants in Bento Fit after a previous attempt even an "AI" agent couldn't pull off.

- AsyncImage gets a built-in cache after years of third-party workarounds; Steve suspects some intern with an unlimited Claude Code budget finally got it done.

- App Actions now supports natural language invocation without requiring specific phrases or app name mentions, though exact limits remain fuzzy.

- Aaron flags resizable iOS windows (previously iPad-only) and an arbitrary-aspect-ratio Simulator replacement as very suspicious folding phone tea leaves.

- Kotaro closes on Snow Leopard-style speed wins across the board, including 80% faster AirDrop, because speed is still a feature worth shipping.

## Links

**One More Thing**

Cleo Family: https://www.cleofamily.app/track

**PhillyCocoa:** https://phillycocoa.org

Intro music: "When I Hit the Floor", © 2021 Lorne Behrman. Used with permission of the artist.