So there’s been a ton of hype around Claude, and I recently watched the Fireship video talking about how good Claude 3.7 is—how it outperformed all these other models, this, that, blah blah—to the point where I actually became interested in it. It isn’t that normal for me to be interested enough to try some new AI tool. Don’t get me wrong: I think AI is cool, and it’s really nice for handling a lot of otherwise mundane and boring tasks, but if you’re trying to use it to solve new or complex problems…it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth.

In my experience, you really need to be familiar with the problem you’re asking it to solve. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea if it’s correct or not because, at their core, these LLMs are just trying to predict the next sequence of words that will make you happy. They’re not thinking. Sure, they’re getting more advanced, with backstops and more complex reasoning models, but at the end of the day, they’re just text prediction models.

Anyway, I say all of this because I actually paid the money, downloaded the Claude Code Terminal thing, and tried to get it to do something really simple. My prompt: I have a Mac running Sequoia 15.3.1, and I want you to put an icon at the top of the Mac. It doesn’t need to do anything, it just needs to be there and when I click it I should see a dropdown menu. If you know anything about Mac development, all that means is a Mac app that’s agent-only—it has no Dock icon, just an icon at the top of the screen. Simple enough, right?

Wrong. This thing, in like five dollars’ worth of prompts over multiple sessions, could not put an icon at the top of the Mac. It was ridiculous. It got so bad that, by the time we were finished, it was telling me there was probably a problem with my system and that I should reset the NVRAM on my Mac or take it to get repaired. lol.

This so-called advanced, crazy-good model? I am not sure what people are using it for. From what I can tell from the fireship video, it’s really good at solving LeetCode problems—which I have not found to be that useful when actually trying to actually build things—or supposedly it’s great for front-end web development, like TypeScript or React or whatever. But when it comes to putting an icon at the top of a Mac, it is… um… not good.

Anyway, after multiple tries, multiple sessions, multiple prompts—five dollars’ worth of credits, which is a lot of tokens—I went to ChatGPT. Not even their advanced o1 model, not the research mode, nothing crazy, just regular GPT-4o. I asked the same thing, and first try, it gave me the code and instructions to put an icon in the freaking Mac 😆.

So yeah, I’m not sure if Claude is as good as everyone’s making it out to be or if perhaps it just can’t put an icon at the top of a MacOS computer. I still think AI is more of a supplemental tool than a developer replacement at this point.

All that being said, the reason I wanted an icon in the first place is that I check Hacker News daily, and it’s easy to forget to go there. Sometimes there’s nothing good, and sometimes I just forget. So what I wanted was a little icon at the top of the Mac that would show the newest five items from Hacker News with over a certain threshold of points—by default, 250, but that can be changed in the preferences.

That way, whenever I open my Mac, the most recent popular posts with over 250 points are right there. I set it to check once an hour throughout the day, so if something new pops up that meets the threshold, I get a little blip—a beep, a ping, whatever—and it reminds me, oh, OK, maybe there’s something interesting there. And if it gets too noisy, you can just increase the threshold, or if you want to see things more often, you can decrease it. If something looks interesting, clicking it will take you directly to the article:

Easy. Super easy.

So yeah, if that seems interesting to you too, here’s the link to the app/code. You can either build from source or just download this zip, unzip the app, and run it.