Notes on building things: native Mac apps, browser games, design systems, working with Claude, and the trade-offs behind them. 17 posts, newest first.
Latest · October 2, 2026
Six apps, one person, and feedback arriving from anywhere. How I use SnagFrog to get every bug report and suggestion into one inbox, with logs attached, and how Claude now fixes most of them and writes back to the person who sent it.
My product sites were black and my own site was white, so every "by Karakabakov" link was a small culture shock. How I moved everything onto one system: shared tokens, one button style, one hero, and an accent that is the only thing each product keeps for itself.
Cleat is a native Mac launcher: apps, files, clipboard history, window snapping, sums, timers and a local assistant from one keystroke. $49 once, no account, no analytics.
System Settings says System Data and stops there. A Mac disk analyser that names what is inside it, sizes Xcode by what it really costs, and folds what it cannot prove into one honest row rather than guessing at it.
OpenMontage runs video production as a pipeline an agent drives. It found thirty stock clips of real life, generated three more, picked the music by measuring it, and hand-wrote the Remotion composition. Thirty seconds, $6.13, no screenshots in it.
Notes in two apps, a new habit tracker every month, trips planned wherever I happened to be sitting. So I described the app I actually wanted, Claude built it, and thirty trackers now live in one place on my own disk.
A medieval Peggle built in Phaser and Matter, with 48 boards drawn as pictures, a spacing guarantee the tests hold to, and a shot predictor that runs the real solver in a headless world rather than approximating it.
macOS quietly dropped its sleep timer in Ventura. Here is what replaced it, why the Terminal fix falls short, and the free menu bar app that brings it back.
Halworth XP is a browser horror game that is entirely an IT support desk. Thirty shifts, 75 tickets, four endings, and a help article that reads perfectly while telling you to do the wrong thing.
A real-time draw-and-guess party game on a floating 3D island, built with React Three Fiber and Firebase — and the cold starts that cost more than the rendering.
A roguelike deckbuilder that scores every three-in-a-row as a three-card poker hand. Built in Phaser and TypeScript, tuned by a headless balance harness, with no image assets anywhere.
Opus to plan, Sonnet to build, Haiku for the errands — plus effort levels, context hygiene, and a skills tutorial. The dials that actually move the bill.
What each era actually solved — jQuery, Backbone, CoffeeScript, Angular, React, React Native — and the handful of lessons that outlived all of them.
Building the components is the fifth of the work nobody warns you about. Standards, Storybook, a coverage floor, and adoption.
Vanilla three.js, a procedurally generated house, co-op multiplayer and a global leaderboard — with no bundler anywhere.
PocketBase gives you an embedded database, real-time subscriptions, authentication and a REST API in a single Go binary.
A guide to Astro 2.0's islands architecture and what it changes about shipping JavaScript to the browser.