A few days ago, I switched from Omarchy back to macOS. Pretty quickly, I ran into something that annoyed me more than I expected: capturing my screen and sharing it felt like too much work.
I wanted to record something, explain what was happening, and send it. Sometimes I just wanted a screenshot I could paste into a conversation. Small things I do all the time while building.
I kept thinking about how I wanted that experience to feel. Open a small utility, choose what I need, hit record, get on with my day.
So I opened T3 Code, started talking to Codex, and described the app I wanted to build.
That became TUCK.
I wanted a native macOS app. Something small that felt at home on the Mac and made a few everyday actions easy to reach.
A lot of that came from using Omarchy. What stayed with me was its willingness to make decisions about how things should work. There’s a certain comfort in using something opinionated when those opinions make sense to you. You spend less time arranging your tools and more time doing whatever you opened the computer for.
I wanted to bring some of that into TUCK.
The goal was a clean screen recording in under five clicks. Camera, system sound, and presentation tools should be right there when you need them. If you want to draw while explaining something, you should be able to do that without turning the recording into a whole production.
A few buttons, a few ticks if you need them, then record.
I had the same feeling about screenshots. Press Option three times, select an area, and the screenshot lands on your clipboard. Paste it wherever you were going to send it. TUCK keeps a local copy too, but you can carry on without finding a file on your desktop first.
These sound like tiny details. They are tiny details. But when you repeat an action throughout the day, you start caring quite a lot about every unnecessary step.
Building it was where things got a little surreal.
I know a little Swift. Enough to have some footing, nowhere near enough to say I knew my way around building this entire app when I started.
With Codex, I could work through it anyway.
I could describe the experience I wanted, build towards it, try it, and come back with something more specific. This control takes too much effort to reach. This interaction feels awkward. I want the camera here. I want to start a capture without having to think about the app itself.
Having something running made those conversations much more useful. I could react to the actual experience and keep steering it.
And over time, this thing that had mostly existed in my head became a native app on my Mac. Eventually, it became something I felt confident enough to show people and start talking about publicly.
That’s the part of vibe coding I keep thinking about.
Knowing what direction to take a product gives you a lot to work with. You can recognise when an interaction feels wrong, explain why, and keep pushing until it feels closer to what you meant.
You still need to pay attention. You need to try what gets built. You need enough understanding to question things and work through the parts that break. But the distance you can travel with that understanding feels very different now.
Programming languages are starting to feel like another layer of abstraction I can work through.
Learning them still matters to me. Understanding more Swift would help me make better decisions about TUCK, and working on TUCK gives me a reason to learn it. I’m just able to build much further while that learning is happening.
I used to associate projects like this with a long stretch of preparation before I could really begin. Now I can start with the programming knowledge I have, a clear idea of what I want, and a willingness to keep figuring things out.
Seeing that turn into an app I actually use is a strange, very satisfying feeling.
TUCK is still in beta. There are rough edges, and I want people using it in their own workflows so we can find what needs improving. If you’d like to try it, get in touch. I’d love to hear where it saves you effort and where it still gets in your way.
I want to keep building tools like this. Small things that come from an annoyance I know well enough to have an opinion about.
I may have left Omarchy behind as my daily operating system, but I’m carrying a lot of its philosophy with me. TUCK is one place it’s already showing up.