I have one weird trick for people who are exploring this vein. I last opened an Xcode project about five years ago so I could be way behind the times.

Having spent many years fighting with Xcode professionally, I was thrilled when swift build came out, and then appalled at how badly Xcode adopted it. Eventually I realized that you can set up your entire app as a swift package, and then the Xcode project with a single main source file that calls some `app_main()` (or whatever you want to call it) function in your package.

I cannot remember exactly but there was something annoying about setting up a new project; I think by default Xcode assumes that you want a swift package to be treated as a dependency that is checked out from git, but there was a way to drag and drop a local dependency in the same project directory and then it worked.

What this buys you is that files are no longer tracked by Xcode, so renames/merges no longer trigger project.pbxproj surgery. Instead you specify the swift package directories and are done.

I used this for some large personal projects and was very happy with it.

At one point I also wrote my own build tool that imitated all of the steps that Xcode took so that I could truly be Xcode-free. That also worked (and was not even that hard) but I went back to Xcode because the debugger UI was better than what I could get out of VS Code at the time, and especially because I was playing around with the Metal debugger.