How to export skills from Xcode 27

Issue #1047

Xcode 27 ships with a set of agent skills that capture Apple’s own guidance for writing modern Swift and SwiftUI code. These skills cover things like adopting the newest SwiftUI APIs, modernizing UIKit apps, and auditing security settings.

They are designed to be consumed by coding agents, but they are just as useful when you want to read Apple’s recommendations directly or feed them into your own tooling. The good news is you can export all of them to a folder with a single command.

Exporting the skills

The command lives under xcrun, which routes to the active toolchain. To pull every skill into a directory, run:

xcrun agent skills export --output-dir ~/Downloads/xcode-skills

If you leave off --output-dir, the command exports to the default location instead. Once it finishes, you will see a list of the skills it wrote out:

Exported 7 skills to /Users/khoa/Desktop/xcode-skills
  ✓ swiftui-specialist
  ✓ c-bounds-safety
  ✓ audit-xcode-security-settings
  ✓ test-modernizer
  ✓ uikit-app-modernization
  ✓ device-interaction
  ✓ swiftui-whats-new-27

Each skill lands in its own folder, ready to open or hand off to an agent.

Use Xcode 27 toolchain

Most of the time the export works on the first try. If it does not, the usual cause is that your command line tools still point at an older Xcode. The xcrun command resolves to whatever toolchain is selected, so if that selection is stale, agent skills will not be available.

The fix is to point the command line tools at Xcode 27. Open Xcode 27, go to Settings, then the Locations tab. Find the Command Line Tools dropdown and set it to Xcode 27. If your install is named Xcode-beta, pick that entry instead.