Our DNA is written in Swift
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. The third time you vendor a JSON type, it…
It started, as these things do, with a shortcut I was certain would work. I ve been building SwiftAgents, my Swift framework for talking to language models, and one of the local providers it supports is LM Studio — the app a lot of us reach for to run models on our own Macs. LM Studio recently grew support for the newer Responses API, the OpenAI-style endpoint that can remember a conversation for…
It 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…
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. When I published the SwiftCross post on June 2nd, I left two threads dangling: an agent was refactoring SwiftMCP s package structure so client-only consumers wouldn…
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…
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,…
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…
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. But it…
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…
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…
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. I cannot remember what prompted me to such madness: I just wanted to try it and see if Opus could get it to…
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…
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. Besides of the old language there were too many dependencies into even more Objective-C frameworks, namely…
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. The CLI of the project has four main functions at this time: This is all some kind of housekeeping work, so at first I…
My 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. SwiftText The Mail Room Skill I ve been building processes hundreds of emails daily, converting HTML bodies to markdown…
Instead 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. I am working a lot on a private project for a client at this moment where I am making MCP for all communication. Previously…
Many moons ago I had the idea that I would like for an agentic system to be able to access my e-mail servers. That came to me when I automated collecting incoming invoices for my company with a make.com workflow. But that didn t amount to much until OpenClaw hit the world s stage. The second key project besides SwiftMail was SwiftMCP. Those two together were the first link I had between ChatGPT…
A few days ago I emailed to the OpenClaw team hoping to be considered for a maintaining role. That s been the second such email I sent, the first one went straight to Peter Steinberger himself like at 4 o clock in the morning without doing any kind of proof-reading. Sadly, I haven t gotten any response on either channel so far, so I fear that the ship has sailed. Compiling my achievements for the…
It’s 5 months since the release of SwiftMCP 1.0 and I’ve been slow cooking some enhancements for it. It was rewarding to see a bit of interested in this package, judging by issues and forks I could see on GitHub. Today, I’m revealing the work for the client-side I’ve done during this time. The first version of SwiftMCP naturally focussed entirely on the server-side. You can annotate any class or…
Over the course of the last year, I ve had quite a few side projects that required some way to get text from a variety of sources, with code and frameworks found in a number of private repos. A while ago, I felt an inkling to start pulling those together into an open source project. So this will be my Christmas gift for you this year. SwiftText collects various ways of getting text — or, if…