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As software engineers, we take pride in hand-written code and knowing how everything we build works in detail. While there are many developers out there who build good software, there are many, many more who don’t. Yet we balk at the idea of vibe coding, even when it yields decent results. You don’t need a scientific study to realize the mean quality of human-authored software leaned towards slop even before AI was around. How many times have you been frustrated by an app or website that just didn’t work right? (This is especially true for software produced by big companies.) The quality of software humans can build is absolutely incredible. But the quality of software humans actually do build is usually not. So no, AI can’t build perfect software. Maybe that will improve in the future, or maybe it will remain just as messy as the human-authored code LLMs have been trained on. I don’t think any of that matters, because if AI can build software that’s at least as good as the mediocre code that came before it, that will be acceptable for most industries. Customers don’t care about the craft, they care about the result. And if the result is faster, cheaper, and good enough…well, that’s a better combination than anything they’ve ever had before. Why wouldn't they choose it?
I launched ColorCopy on May 18. It was my second macOS app, but the first one I launched on the Mac App Store. Today, I decided to pull it. The app isn't a new idea, but it bakes four color tools into a single menu bar app: an eyedropper, a color picker, a palette manager, and a contrast checker, each one a hotkey away. I made it available for free, with a one-time in-app purchase to unlock unlimited use. No subscription, no recurring fees. It's simple, stable software with the lowest possible barrier to entry…exactly the kind of utility the App Store seems made for. I wasn't sure what to expect, so I ran an experiment to answer some questions: Is there any real benefit to having your Mac app on the App Store? Is the Apple tax worth it? Will customers just come flooding in? For ColorCopy's release, I did zero marketing. No Product Hunt launch. No Hacker News post. The only things I published were this blog post and a tweet. If the App Store delivers on its promise of discoverability, that should be enough to see some kind of traffic…right? You be the judge. In nearly three months on the App Store, ColorCopy got a little over 1,000 impressions, 149 product page views, 85 first-time downloads, three in-app purchases, and $21 in proceeds. Not per day. In total. Broken down over 81 days, that averages out to: 13 impressions per day 1.8 product page views per day 1 download per day 0.04 in-app purchases per day (about one per month) $0.26 in proceeds per day Extrapolated to 12 months, ColorCopy would have earned about $95…not even enough to cover Apple's $99 annual developer fee. If discoverability isn't a part of the App Store deal, what exactly is the benefit? Why limit your Mac app to the sandbox?* Why spend hours in App Store Connect filling out metadata, screenshots, and localization information? Why wait an arbitrary number of days for someone to review your app with the consistency of a coin flip? It doesn't seem worth it for Mac developers. Adios, App Store 👋 As of today, ColorCopy is self-distributed and sold through Polar (the new Stripe, which I highly recommend). This is the same way I sell TongueType, which makes pretty much everything easier on my end: one dashboard, real customer relationships, no finicky review process, and updates ship the moment they're ready. The move required swapping out in-app purchases from StoreKit to Polar, and updates now ship through Sparkle instead of the App Store's built-in update mechanism. Both are tried and true solutions for self-distributed Mac apps. To be fair, you can't really do this on iOS. Most users aren't jailbroken…walled garden and all. But on Mac, where self-distribution is still a first-class option, there seems to be zero incentive to be in the App Store, especially if you're counting on discoverability. In three months, the App Store sent me barely a trickle of customers. Had I marketed the app myself, the traffic would have flowed the other way. I would've been sending my customers to Apple and paying a tax for the privilege.** Self-distribution gives me the freedom and control over my apps that the App Store's sandbox never will. If it's on me to drum up all of my own traffic, I'm going to send it to my own website. *I originally used a third-party library for the eye dropper because NSColorSampler is meh, but the sandbox forbids it so I was forced to remove it. Yes, I had to make my app shittier in order to put it on the App Store. **I fully acknowledge this may not be the case for every app, but it was my experience and worth sharing. Your mileage may vary. Aside: ColorCopy was available in 10 languages on the App Store. For some reason, the listing always showed FR as its primary language (it wasn't). The app is available in many languages, including English.
I built the dictation app I wanted. It's called TongueType, and my daughter did the voice over for the video. (Family business.) It hasn't gotten much traction yet, and I think I know why: dictation has been bad for so long that most people stopped paying attention. I don't blame them. But I don't think most people realize how good local models have gotten. The thing that was flaky and frustrating five years ago is genuinely good now, and it runs entirely on your Mac. Downloads are low. But the conversion rate is great. The people who actually try it tend to stick around, which tells me the problem isn't the app, it's getting someone to give dictation one more honest chance. The real hurdle is the habit The hard part isn't accuracy. It's that talking instead of typing is a new habit, and new habits are awkward before they're automatic. For the first week it feels strange. You catch yourself reaching for the keyboard out of muscle memory. Then one day it clicks, and you realize how slow typing was making you for certain things. I still write code by hand. That's thinking, not transcribing, and I want my fingers on it (plus saying HTML tags and attributes out loud seems counterintuitive 😂). But for almost everything else, I talk. I prompt LLMs I send emails I reply on Slack I write commit messages I do most other text with my voice The common thread is that the thinking is already done and the only thing left is getting the words out. That turns out to be a surprising amount of my day. My desk setup On the go, the MacBook's built-in mic works just fine. You don't need fancy hardware to get good results. But when I'm at my desk, my laptop is docked, so I pair TongueType with a Tula mic. It's small, portable, sounds great, and looks the part! (Kuru Toga mechanical pencil positioned for size comparison.) One tip: use a wired mic if you can. Bluetooth adds latency, and latency is the enemy of a tool you reach for dozens of times a day. A wired connection makes the whole thing feel instant. Honest caveat: it's probably not a great look in a co-working space. 😂 "Why is this better than macOS dictation?" More accurate. Less flaky. More customizable. More fun. I could list the features, but the honest answer is the same one I'd give for most things: just try it and you'll feel the difference immediately. It's free to start. What's your experience been with dictation? If you wrote it off years ago, I'd genuinely love for you to give TongueType a shot and tell me what you think.
I just launched my first macOS app called TongueType. It's voice dictation that runs entirely on your Mac. Hold a key, speak, release, and your words appear wherever your cursor happens to be. I build small, simple, stable software. TongueType fits that description, and it scratches an itch I've had for a while. Why I made it I type fast, but I often think faster than I type. When an idea is fully formed in my head, the bottleneck is my fingers. macOS has had built-in dictation forever, but I never liked relying on it. Accuracy aside, I didn't love the idea of my voice taking a trip to a server and back just to write a sentence. There are many dictation apps in the wild, but I want one that's privacy focused, doesn't send data to the cloud, doesn't charge a monthly subscription, and gets out of the way. TongueType uses OpenAI's Whisper model running locally on Apple Silicon. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing is logged. There's no account to create. Zero telemetry. Your voice never leaves your Mac. How it works The whole interaction is one key. By default it's the Right Option key, because it's sitting right there and your thumb isn't doing anything important. Hold it, talk, let go. The transcribed text is inserted at your cursor…in your editor, your email, a chat box, a search field, anywhere text goes. You can also drop in an audio or video file — WAV, MP3, MP4, MOV — and get a transcript back. Handy for meeting recordings and voice memos. A few things I sweated the details on: A grace period so a quick accidental tap doesn't start recording. Double-tap to latch for when you want to keep talking without holding the key down. Cancel phrases — say "scratch that" at the end and the whole thing gets discarded. You will use this more than you expect. Spoken symbols — say "new line" or "question mark" and you get the symbol, not the words. Post-processing — for common terms that seldom get dictated properly. TongueType speaks twelve languages and includes automatic detection, so you don't have to tell it which one you're using. How I actually use it Building the app was one thing. Using it every day turned out to be another. A couple months in, it's quietly worked its way into most of what I do at the keyboard: Prompting LLMs. Talking to an AI assistant is conversational by nature, and typing out a long, detailed prompt is tedious. Speaking it isn't. I get more context into a prompt because I'm not rationing my words to save my fingers. Email. Replies that used to sit in my drafts now get spoken out in a single pass. I still read them before sending, but the blank-page friction is gone. Code comments and commit messages. The parts of coding that are just writing. It's faster to explain why a change exists out loud than to stop and type it. Direct messages. Quick replies in chat without breaking flow. Hold the key, say it, done. The common thread: TongueType is best wherever the thinking is already done and the only thing left is getting words out. That's a surprising amount of my work day. A fun personality TongueType is minimal and fun. It lives in the menu bar. The recording overlay is small and out of the way, and you can configure its position on screen. There are twenty accent colors including Rainbow Mode. None of these extras were necessary, but all of it was fun to build. Accessibility I want to call this out specifically. Voice dictation isn't only a convenience. For some people it's the difference between using a computer comfortably or not. If typing is painful or difficult for you, TongueType is built to be a genuine alternate input method, not an afterthought. That mattered to me, and it shaped a lot of the decisions above. Pricing TongueType is free to try, and the free tier includes every feature. You get 30 minutes of live dictation each month and short file transcriptions. If you want unlimited, TongueType Pro is a one-time $19.99 purchase that covers up to five Macs and unlocks unlimited dictation and full-length file transcription. No subscription. Buy it once, keep it forever. Requirements TongueType needs macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). The local model is the whole point, and that's what makes it run so well. If any of this sounds useful, give it a try at TongueType.app. It's free to start, and I'd genuinely like to hear what you think.
I believe artificial intelligence is a powerful and valuable tool that can significantly improve how we create, solve problems, and bring ideas to life. I didn't always feel this way.. But these days, I use AI regularly in my work and I expect that to continue. We may not have chosen this reality, but it's the reality we're in. The tools and their benefits — costs be damned — can no longer be ignored. That said, when people ask "was this made with AI?" the honest answer is rarely simple. AI can speed up many parts of the process, but it doesn’t replace human judgment, creativity, or responsibility. What appears effortless on the surface rests on deliberate human direction, critical thinking, and careful review. Getting good results from AI requires active guidance and oversight. The nuances of context, ethics, user needs, and real-world application are simply too varied given the current technology. Moreover, AI doesn’t generate meaningful ideas or elegant solutions on its own. Strong human vision, architecture, and decision-making are still essential. There is no prompt, model, or service that can deliver finished, trustworthy work without substantial human input. My commitment to you is this: everything I create will be driven by human ideas, architecture, verification, and final review. I will use AI as an assistant to do what I would have done anyway, but more efficiently. I will not let AI replace my intelligence, but I will use it to turn my intelligence into code faster. — Cory LaViska
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Reading my recent computing retrospective, I realised there was a big section missing: the people in my life that made an impact and helped shape my career. Outside my immediate family, one person made an outsized contribution, and I’m fairly certain that without his influence my life would have taken a very different path. The fact that I’m still here in 2026, still writing code and being fortunate enough to have a career in something I love is testament to him. So I’d like to take a few moments to talk about my old secondary school teacher, George Dryden. Denied Back in 1995, I had a problem. I knew I wanted to study computing at university and build a career out of my passion, but there was a snag. For those unfamiliar with the UK schooling system, when you’re 15-16 you take a set of GCSE exams in a broad range of subjects. After that, you pick around 3 subjects to really focus on over a period of 2 years. These are called A Levels, and they are a big step up and are meant to prepare you for a degree-level course at university. Admission to university is also governed by these results - if you want to study computing, you’re going to need a computing A-Level, and most universities will only accept you (or “make an offer”) if you achieve a certain grade. And whilst I had taken computing at a GCSE level, my school did not offer a computing A-Level course. I instead had to settle on “Design & Technology”, which just didn’t inspire me. Instead of working on my portfolio and projects, I spent most of my time daydreaming and writing code on the Acorn Archimedes computers that were the staple of every 90s UK school. No disrespect to the teachers - they were all awesome - but it just wasn’t for me. I was miserable, and by the end of my first year, I was well on my way to failing outright with my entire future plans seemingly going up in smoke. Someone noticed That’s when George stepped in. He’d taught me computing right the way through my GCSEs, and with no A-Level course on offer, that was officially where his involvement was supposed to have ended. It didn’t. He had noticed my constant presence in the computing labs - before and after school, during lunch breaks, free “study” periods - working on some little pet project or digging into RISC OS internals. I remember him as warm, with a wicked, dry sense of humour, and a refreshingly spiky attitude to authority - I always got the sense he’d worked out for himself which rules were worth taking seriously and which ones weren’t. And he always had time for me. I spent years pestering him with questions that had nothing to do with anything on the syllabus, and he’d always find a way to answer them that actually made sense. He was just as supportive of my odd little obsessions. At one point I’d got deep into the BBS scene, which I thought was the coolest thing ever, and decided what the school really needed was an internal BBS running on its own network. So I wrote one. It was deeply cringeworthy, obviously - but George helped me put posters up around the school advertising it, and even gave it a mention in assembly one morning. I think about five people in total ever checked it out. It didn’t matter: a teacher had stood up in front of the entire school and treated my weird little project like it was worth something, and that was a hugely validating moment for me. Off the books He recognised the passion, and eventually he made a suggestion: What if I quit the Design and Technology course, and instead attempt the A-level course myself? Personally, I also suspect he was enjoying himself. There was some internal school politics behind why computing wasn’t offered at A-Level in the first place - I never knew the details - and I think the prospect of one of his students simply going out and getting the qualification anyway appealed to him on two separate levels. It would get me where I wanted to go, and it would wind up exactly the right people. It wouldn’t be easy, he warned. The school would be against it, plus it was a two-year course which I’d have to cram into one year. I’d have to do it all myself - studying, lesson planning, coursework - he couldn’t help me in an official capacity, but he said he’d advocate for me and help where he could. If I had assignments, he’d send them off to be graded and would give feedback in his own time. He’d enter me in for the exams and also gave me a set of keys to the computer lab so I could use it whenever I needed. It was the first time anybody outside my own family had really shown faith in my abilities and encouraged me to take a stand. It was a pivotal moment for me - I realised if I wanted something badly enough I would have to fight for it, but I could still make it happen. I didn’t have to take “NO” for an answer - a lesson I think I picked up from watching him as much as from anything he ever actually said to me. After a few weeks of dithering, I took the jump. I remember a few awkward meetings with the school administration but thanks to his behind-the-scenes work, I was soon following my dream. An intense year And yes, it was bloody hard work. I had to condense an entire two year course into under a year, be disciplined enough to produce my own study plan, and be critical enough of my own shortcomings that I could focus my study where it was needed. I pretty much lived and breathed it for months straight and was more-or-less a permanent fixture in the labs or school library poring over my course books. I’d make lists of questions and chat to George over lunch, and he’d provide guidance and encouragement. It was a lonely way to learn with no classmates to compare notes with, no lessons to turn up to, and right up until the end I had no real idea whether any of it was good enough - but bit by bit, it started to feel like something I could actually pull off. And sure enough, in the late spring of 1996, I sat down in an exam hall with my fellow students, the only one with an A-Level computing question paper in front of me. The final exam went by in a blur - I can only remember a few of the questions now (and a peculiar obsession with the Pascal language) - but I do remember the euphoria as the invigilator called “time’s up, pens down, close your papers NOW”. I had done it. A few nerve-wracking months later, my Mum drove me into school to pick up my results. I ripped open the envelope and saw it - I’d passed with an A grade! I literally ran up the stairs to George’s office next to the computing labs to thank him personally. I’d taken my camera into school to take a few last photos for memory’s sake and snapped this photo of him before I walked out the school gates for the last time: A different path Because of him, I managed to get into my university of choice, studying computing with a focus on networks. Because of that, I landed my first job working as a “webmaster”, and my career since has been one of the highlights of my life. All these years later, it’s a real privilege to be able to get up each morning and actively look forward to working in an industry I love. Without George stepping up for me and encouraging me to believe in myself, none of that would have happened. I wouldn’t have had the career I have, and I wouldn’t be where I am now. I met my wife when we both worked at a software company - she sat at the desk behind me - so even my home and family life can be traced back to that spring of 1996. And the A-Level itself was only half of what I took away from that year. The qualification opened the door to university, but the lesson that came with it was every bit as important: that a “no” isn’t always the end of it, and that sometimes the answer can be argued with. I’m so proud of what I managed to achieve all those years ago, and even more thankful to have had someone like George in my life to put me on the right track. Mr. Dryden I did see him again after I left. He drank in one of my local pubs - a pub I’d been going to for a good while before I was technically old enough to be in it - and I’d say hello if I spotted him in there, mostly in the months before I moved away to university. After that it was only a handful of times. For years I’d find myself scanning the room whenever I was back home and in for a pint, half expecting him to be at the bar. At some point I stopped seeing him altogether and eventually moved across the country. The trouble was I never really knew how to talk to him outside of school. He was always Mr. Dryden, or just “Sir”, I don’t think I ever once called him George to his face! I was (and still am if I’m honest) fairly socially awkward, and I never worked out how to phrase the thing I actually wanted to say: that he had changed the entire direction of my life, and I wasn’t sure he knew it. So instead I’d say hello, and ask how he was, talk about nothing much, and go back to my friends. Epilogue Sadly, 3 years ago now, I opened the latest issue of my old school alumni newsletter to read that he’d passed away. The photo at the start of this article was taken from his obituary article and I read that he’d had a long illness and had suffered from dementia at the end. I did write to him years ago by email - I don’t know if he ever got it, or was in any capacity to understand what he’d done for me, but I hope so. There’s an old saying by one of my favourite authors (Terry Pratchett) that “no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away”. In one of his books, a character keeps the memory of his son alive by passing his name along a series of telegraph towers. It’s in that spirit that I’m writing this post - I debated it for many years as it’s very personal to me and I also have no contact with any of George’s family so I have no idea what they would make of it all. But even though it’s 30+ years ago now, I will never forget him or what he did for me - and at least now, if someone searches his name it’ll be recorded here for as long as I’m alive and running this site. Thank you, Sir. George Dryden 1942-2023
Let’s step inside the kernel and understand how it implements copy-on-write and what are its implications for the performance of user-space systems
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
A frustrated Reddit post about being a condom between an AI and production made the rounds in our team. Here is why I think the opposite is true and what it means for how we review code, plan work and think.
And here we are three years after I wrote about the Google Pixel Fold being announced, followed now with the announcement of the iPhone Duo...(I have questions about the naming by the way). Four years ago I was talking about web primitives in the platform for the Surface Duo. My how time flies. There are CSS media features, a Viewport Segments API, a Device Posture API but Chromium based browsers are the only ones currently supporting these things. I haven't been able to find any signal yet on whether Safari will support these things in the web platform as the developer docs focus on application development. If you're interested in trying out the platform features, you can emulate the Surface Duo and Galaxy Z Fold in the developer tools. And if you're thinking, do I really have to have my website adapt to two screens? The answer is no. Adding a design to an application or dual screen makes sense if you have an experience that has two simulataneous contexts that are useful e.g. a list of email messages/inbox on one screen, an open message, email thread or email composer on the other. Here's one of my talks from 2022 if you're interested in learning more about what's available in the browser for dual screen/foldable devices. Happy building :)
