I’m not saying they’re going to deprecate XCode today, but I do believe they will “agent’ize” Developer Tooling drastically in the next year or so. Agents are becoming the most important user of command line tools.
Because they have to, in order to catch up with NVidia, their only real competition. If you want to understand why I think that, its because I have been developing and deploying cross-platform Linux-centric (but MacOS and Windows targeting) applications, mostly for the ARM platform but also with Intel (SIMD on both) .. for the past few months, and I haven’t touched an IDE in a month. On DGX Spark. Which turns out is a truly, utterly, mind-blowingly great platform to do cross platform high performance application development…
CLI is just a thing that NeXT had and even that made it easy to use GUI tools.
Xcode is a GUI tool – it happens to expose some cli tools but they could be covered up – however some developers would complain a lot so I don't see that happeneing.
The original question is, why aren’t Apple fixing the CA problems for the command line tools (whereas they have done it for .app’s such as Safari), and the reasoning is, because the user will just have to fix it themselves, because Apple don’t care about the command line users - they see that these command line tools are, indeed, becoming the front-line for agentic development, so .. presumably, they have an .app bundle which does away with this problem, to be shipped on the horizon ...