How does the system find your intents, and why can they not be registered at runtime?

Intents are discovered at build time. When an app or extension target is built, Xcode runs the App Intents metadata processor over the compiled module and writes a Metadata.appintents folder into the bundle, containing extract.actionsdata (JSON) and version.json. In a small app with one intent (AddNote with a text parameter), the JSON listed it under actions with its identifier, parameters, isDiscoverable: true and openAppWhenRun: false, next to empty sections for entities, enums, queries and auto shortcuts. The system reads that file when the app is installed to populate Shortcuts, Spotlight and Siri, which is why there is no runtime registration API: an intent not compiled into the target does not exist for the system.

Practical results: intents in a Swift package or static library need to be surfaced to the app target (the AppIntentsPackage mechanism), so keep them in the app or widget target while you are learning it; when an intent does not appear, look for the bundle’s Metadata.appintents and check the build log for the processor step; and an intent shared by app and widget must be compiled into the process that should run it (Q407). Run once with Xcode 27.2 via a hand-made project; this is recorded in NOTES.md rather than in verify.py because it needs xcodebuild.