27th March 2026

I have a new laptop—a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be very capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided to vibe code up some alternative tools for monitoring performance and I’m very happy with the results.

This is my second experiment with vibe coding macOS apps—the first was this presentation app a few weeks ago.

It turns out Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are both very competent at SwiftUI—and a full SwiftUI app can fit in a single text file, which means I can use them to spin something up without even opening Xcode.

I’ve built two apps so far: Bandwidther shows me what apps are using network bandwidth and Gpuer to show me what’s going on with the GPU. At Claude’s suggestion both of these are now menu bar icons that open a panel full of information.