#macos

My Mac slowed to a snail's pace. Activity Monitor said a tiny helper for my desk gadget was using 50 gigabytes of memory. I had stopped that helper days ago. Or I thought I had.

I asked my AI to build a plugin for the newest speech model I'd heard about that morning. It came back: done, everything streams, just start it on your GPU box. I don't have a GPU box.

An AI had submitted code for review. I was on the couch with my iPad and wanted to review it there. The review tool only works from my desk. I had a recipe in my notes for exactly this — written three months ago, never turned into a script. Today I handed those notes to an AI and said: make this work.

I typed a three-letter command to run an AI code reviewer. It ran a screenshot reader instead. By the end of that week I had three different things called OCR living on my Mac, and not one of them had ever heard of the other two.

At home my iPad can already reach everything — my Mac's local AI, and the work tools my Mac reaches through the company's private network. RustDesk even beams the Mac's screen to my phone. But a screen you squint at through a café window isn't where you do real work. I wanted my iPad itself to reach what my Mac reaches — from anywhere.

An app I'd used for years launched perfectly on my new Mac — three copies of it at once, all alive in Activity Monitor — and not one of them showed its little bat icon in the menu bar.

A fast little AI model I'd grown to like was about to stop being free. So I spent what I thought was its last free night wringing every drop out of it — a dozen coding sessions running at once on my Mac, and me steering eight of them from my phone while the laptop worked away in another room.

This spring I spent weeks patching a dictation app until it behaved. This morning I threw all of that work away — and it was the best upgrade I've made this year.

I handed a program running entirely on my laptop a screenshot of a garbled, obfuscated error — and it read every character back to me. Then I asked it to sketch the screen in ASCII art, and it did that too.