"A gap opened up in Xcode AI tools when Alex shut down. We built into it, and now we're stuck.

We're a small product company; we have built a few coding tools already, and one pattern kept showing up: general-purpose AI coding assistants are everywhere, but almost none are built for Xcode. They live in a browser tab or a separate window; you paste code back and forth, and half the time the suggestion doesn't even compile in your project.

Then Alex Sidebar, one of the few tools that was genuinely Xcode-native and well-liked, shut down. Their team joined OpenAI to work on Codex, downloads stopped, and a real gap opened up in a space we already had conviction about.

So we built Phoenix.vu: an AI agent that lives inside Xcode, writes Swift, watches your build in real time, auto-fixes errors, and shows you a diff before anything's applied. Code stays local on your Mac; nothing gets uploaded. We figured: clear niche, real pain, a competitor just left the field; this should land.

Here's the part we don't have a clean answer for. Signups are low — not "slow ramp" low, more like "something isn't connecting" low. And of the small number who do sign up, we're barely seeing anyone come back and actually use it inside Xcode. Nobody's paid yet either.

So we are genuinely asking, not fishing for reassurance, and we don't know if that's a marketing problem or a product problem

For iOS/Swift devs:

• Is an Xcode-native AI coding agent something you'd actually go looking for, or does it not register as a real problem for you?

• If you'd never heard of Phoenix.vu until this post, why do you think that is — wrong channels, no reason to trust a new tool with real code, or just not a strong enough pain point?

• What would make you actually open a new dev tool a second time, versus sign up once and forget it exists?

For other founders:

• When you're marketing something genuinely new, how did you actually find out where your buyers pay attention — trial and error, or something more deliberate?

• When growth stalls this early and the numbers are too small to read cleanly, how do you tell "wrong channel" apart from "wrong product" without just guessing?

• If you've had a launch flop quietly like this, what's the first thing you changed — the message, the channel, or the product itself?

Looking to hear from you all; We genuinely just want to understand this better and figure out where to improve. Any perspective helps, even a small one.