[zvrba]

> Ostensibly it's human-readable, but because it's generated by Xcode and filled with inscrutable UUIDs, people treat it like a binary file

Inscrutable? It seems like a textual dump of in-memory project structure using UUIDs to represent pointers and links (graph). Yeah, it's a chore to follow manually, but even to me, who has seen this format for the first time ever, it looks rather straightforward. Hasn't anyone written a utility "explorer" of these files?

[btown]

The problem isn't so much that the format is hard to follow - it's that it's unclear what things do. Are those comments towards the end necessary? If there was a weird string somewhere containing AppleScript, how would I know that's not something that an updated version of Xcode decided was necessary due to a feature I activated, perhaps as a side effect of using a new UI element?