A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
I'm seeing that "great-ai-unlock" is happening. I see in last month a lot of new software being codeveloped with claude/codex/gemini/you-name it.
Before, it was too costly to do sth like the Posture app: here, you would have to know Swift and apple apis to write such tool. Would you be C# (very good) programmer with free weekend, and an idea: no cookie for ya.
These days, due to "great-ai-unlock" your skills can be easily transferred and used to cross platforms boundary and code such useful app in a weekend or so.
Jevons paradox is indeed working (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).
It might help "unstick" you if you aren't super confident, but it doesn't seem to me like it's actually leveling up mediocre programmers to "very good" ones, in familiar or unfamiliar domains.
from my own experiences and many others I have seen on this site and elsewhere, I'm not sure how anyone could conclude this.
> it doesn't seem to me like it's actually leveling up mediocre programmers to "very good" ones
Oh well then if this is your metric then maybe your take is correct, but not relevant? From the top level comment I thought we were talking about the bar being lowered for building something thanks to AI and you don't need to become any better at being a programmer to do so.
I have built a very nicely responsive real-time syncing iOS app in what amounts to a weekend of time. (I only have an hour here and there, young kids) I had zero iOS/Swift development experience prior to it.
I can also confirm that this wouldn't have been built if it weren't for Claude Code. It's "just" an improved groceries app, that works especially well for my wife and me.
Without LLM's, and with just an hour here and there, I wouldn't have done the work to learn the intricacies of iOS and Swift dev, set up the app, and actually tweak and polish it so it works well -- just to scratch the itch of a bit better groceries handling.
I love coming up with fun ideas and only having to worry about the fun part - not the toil. I would never have made this app without llm support.
"Help me develop a MacOS app that blurs my screen the closer my mouse is to the top of the monitor"
That was my PoC to see if there's APIs Claude could find that would make this easy to do. Once I proved that worked, I asked it to instead help me devise a way to adjust that blur based on my posture. It suggested the vision framework and measuring head height.
Just kept iterating, one step at a time. Any toil I experienced, I asked it to remove or automate.
However, before that, i set up a blank project in xcode, used the xcode github integration to create a new repo on github, set up one xcode cloud workflow and use it to push one build to testflight. That way, you get all the automatic config of app ids, profiles etc, and xcode cloud can not be enabled other way. Then tell claude to migrate to xcodegen and to run it in CI automatically.
I've started to develop iOS apps from scratch using only claude code web (no mac), by setting up a "Branch Build" workflow in xcode cloud, and a skill that teaches claude how to check builds and fetch logs.
Along with a workflow that pushes any merge on main to internal TestFlight, the dream of developing iPhone apps on the iPhone finally lives. I've tried most options for this over the years and they never stuck.
These are simple apps that build in 1-5 min on xcode cloud. For larger builds it probably won't work so well.
The only issue I’ve had is sometimes Xcode not ‘seeing’ new files that Claude has created along the way, and needing to add these manually into the Xcode project. (A Google around suggests this shouldn’t happen if you create the project in the right way, and yet it still sometimes does.)
An example of where I think the paradox would apply might be one where LLMs made software engineers more efficient yet the demand for SWEs would grow.
Instead, Jevons' paradox refers to a counterintuitive rebound effect: AI tools make engineers more productive, which you'd expect to reduce the marginal demand for additional engineers (since the same output requires fewer people). In reality, this efficiency lowers the effective cost of software development, sparking even greater overall demand for new features and projects, which ultimately increases total spending on engineering talent.
I'm also optimistic about monitors in the form of glasses- even less effort needed to set yourself up for perfect posture. But the sweet spot problem is still very much a thing from what I've seen- can't wait until it's normal for them to have eye tracking, foveated rendering and streaming, and be wireless.
The exception is if there happens to be a reclined-position chair (IKEA POÄNG or similar) around; this gives back support and reduces neck craning enough to make longer sessions more viable, but it’s far from a given that this kind of seating will be available.
The reason for this app is not productivity but for posture.
I don't like adapting my monitor layout when moving between working environments.
Instead of an extra monitor, I have an iPad Pro on a stand.
There's something very attractive for me personally about the sunglasses form factor.
Safer in public, draws less attention, more portable, less headset fatigue, etc.
But obviously trading quality and features.
Also AVP is like $3k, steam frame will probably be $800+, xreal are like half that
For me it’s like settling for a CRT after trying a 4k TV in terms of visuals, but with the form factors reversed.
Still, it’s not for everyone. I use it with my AirPods Max comfortably, I have a sturdy neck. I don’t think my wife could pull it off.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/86285180/the-roost-savi...
It's too bad that nobody on the Surface team has managed to crack this! I'd be much more interested in one if they had.
The whole setup fits into a drawstring gym bag.
Otherwise when you reach your mid-40s, you may find that you'll have to spend years painfully breaking up a lot of adhesions.
How to achieve it? Not sure. Years of physical therapy and I know the position, but:
>I can't remember to do it.
>I feel my body is tight and pulls me back, so I'm constantly fighting it.
>It hurts. Both tiring, and I feel pains in other parts of my back
I have suffered back discomfort and pain in periods I haven’t gone to the gym for long enough to lose back muscle.
The type of pain people weight train suffer tends to be related to muscle or tendon damage. The type of pain that comes from sedentarism tends to be related to overworked (weak) muscles and bad circulation.
I cloned this a few hours ago and started using it and it’s amazing how effective the blur is! And it’s frustrating to learn how quickly I start slouching the second I’m not paying attention.
I’ll echo what I’ve seen others saying about how cool it is to see something come about due to LLM coding that likely wouldn’t have otherwise. Glad to see you actively working on it, and I’ll be using it every day!
P.S. I’ve been an iOS and Mac dev writing Obj-C and then Swift for 16 years now, so if you run into any issues that Claude isn’t sorting out feel free to reach out to me, you can find my contact via my GitHub which is in my profile (same username as hear). Also as I’ll be using this regularly, if I come up with any improvements I’ll be sure to open a PR!
Get it notorized and ask for some money! I will gladly pay it (and I hope others will do it as well).
Awesome concept: ergonomics and/or posture monitoring is a market opportunity for heavy users.
There's no better way for auditing such an app than having the code easily available and looking through it, and compiling it yourself. Which is already the case here.
[0] https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/new-macsync-macos-stealer-...
personally I do not implicitly trust Anthropic or any other company
In general, would you pay for a notorised build of free software, if you had use for that software, even if an un-notorised build or the source code were available?
If notarisation requires you some kind of payment, I would be okay with you charging me some money, if I obviously find your code has a good value for me.
I read comments around here about "Well: you can compile it yourself" or "it's open source! You can check the code by yourself".
And, while all of those arguments are accurate and valid, the point is "I do not feel like it" or, a little reminder, "The Great Suspender" was an example of a beautiful open source little app to suspend tabs on Google Chrome that, one glorious day, switched hands and, suddenly, after some time, someone noticed the repository and the code from the add-in were different, and those changes were made with nefarious intent.
Luckily, somehow found out, but some people do not have the time or the will to be playing that game.
A piece of code that requires access to my camera, regardless of size (<1000 lines of code) or build, it's something I just don't put on my computer without thinking it twice.
Thank you for the tone: I hope I responded to your question :)
I love to buy small apps from indie developers or donate some money to things I use and I love: when I was a student, of course, things were different.
Nowadays, luckily, I can contribute and I do it gladly.
I don't even think notarization gets rid of this problem neither, so the best you can do for this is compile it yourself. Maybe I'm wrong!
That's what I do with every project delivered as docker image. I rebuild the app and the image.
https://nekoze.app Nekoze warns you when you are hunched over.
Years back, we did a couple of whimsical prototypes along those lines (using J!NS MEME, smart glasses): https://youtu.be/LXIY2g-twOA
[1] https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_gb/products/seating/office-c...
Fortunately, I type this, sitting in my wonderful 15 year old Embody chair so I don't actually need to buy now. Everyone is different and I never raved much about Aerons but the Embody has been very good to me, whether my posture is textbook "good" or "badly" slouched and reclined ... it supports and makes me want to sit and work. :-)
I haven’t checked the code yet, but what does the “Claude Mode” mean? Is it a poor naming choice? It implies that the local app is somehow connected to Claude (?)
Right now I'm using a vision library to detect head height which was good enough. I went down a tangent where I hooked it up to my Claude Code instance to take a screen shot and have Claude Code assess how bad my slouch was. Claude would watch a folder for screen shots, read it in, and if it detected bad posture, write to a file the program was watching to adjust blur.
I did this weird work-around so I could use my Claude Code subscription as opposed to the API.
Anyways, it was too slow and Claude was a bad judge of slouchiness. Head height works well enough!
I'll clean this up.
I luckily won't need such feedback loop anymore, had some mild lower back pain show up over 10 years ago and bought a chair without a backrest that, after 3-4 weeks of struggling, trained me to sit up straight. Now I have some random cheap office chair with a backrest, but I rarely lean back to it. Funnily, I was going to give up using that "backrestless" chair after 2 weeks of inconvenience, but decided to give it one more week and then the magic happened :-) Mild lower back pain automatically gone.
But what I have now is this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002FL3LY4
Just don't assemble the backrest at first. If sitting up straight, I just lean wrists on my keyboard wristpad and part of forearms on the desk, no armrests needed either.
Edit: I still use my height-adjustable standing desk, but now it's value is that I could adjust it for the perfect height for my sitting-up-straight position (so no chair armrests needed) and it's been fixed at that height for the last 7 years...
The one I have does have a backrest but because of the way it's shaped you don't actually use it to slouch. It's more there to support when you lean back and want to take a break from typing or something like that.
Same with a codebase search for "anthropic"
ps -- I added two feature requests and commented on another on the repo.
Can't really afford to play with an app that would have such an obvious hit on productivity and mental clarity.
However, I was not familiar with Swift, the app was more or less vibe coded.
My next goal was to learn swift patterns to refactor the app into something that was understood and robust.
I will be reading though your sources to understand production quality Swift!!
I've noticed that the app tends to use 15% of my CPU constantly. I wonder if there is room to improve efficiency so that the app does not hog resources.
Still, always good to see someone push out a new app. Well done.
The blurring of the screen is a much better idea.
I tried opening by right-cliking on the app file, holding option, etc.
I'm on Sequoia 15.7.3 (24G419)
Is this new? In previous version I could just right-click and it would open it.
And looks like Sonoma was the last version to support the right click menu: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40616/14.0/...
I guess this app won’t catch me slouching then.
I get you - but making it absurd is where my brain went immediately. >.<
Congratulations! I love seeing people express themselves to release things that were previously not economically viable to prioritize
Forget worrying about a 10x dev, Claude Code with the Opus 4.5 model has turned me into a 100x developer even in software stacks I'm not even familiar with. And with playwright-mcp its completely absolved the need for UX designers in my workflow because I just point playwright-mcp at an already established and A/B tested website for its UX principles. This gives me results far beyond what v0, lovable or Claude Code would come up with on its own.
No back problems as there's no weight on my spine. No carpal tunnel issues, as my wrists are always flat. No fatigue from holding my body at right angles for hours at a time.
The downside is I look like a total slacker in the office, especially to narrow minded image conscious managers who expect me "to act professionally."
For example, even if you sit perfectly upright, if you have anterior pelvic tilt, it can change the whole dynamics of your spine, that the cervical segment takes a lot of load that it isn't supposed to do.
Or with bad habits you can reprogram your neuromuscular system that it uses the wrong muscles to maintain posture, that can lead a series of problems long term.
If you have back/neck pain or tension that does not resolve in 1-2 weeks, go to a physio.
That alone will likely prevent this from just being a "convert to Linux" vibe session ... which is unfortunate, as I would LOVE to have this on Linux.
Meaning that the way to have "perfect posture" is never to sit up straight in the first place :-)
> Posturr uses your Mac's camera
Not all of us have web cams, or are willing to tolerate them from a security perspective. [apologetic grin]
* laughs histerically
Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color.
Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.
I will also have conversations in my head during my walk, I’ve done this my whole life and I’m not sure to this day whether my lips move during these or not. In any case, I must get some funny looks with head bolted to the ground mumbling to myself…
As for the software. I would not want a camera on 24/7 (on any device, a compromise being my doorbell, which isn't cloud connected). It'd defeat the small LED which informs you it is on (since it is always-on), and if the machine is compromised this is a method to receive personal data.
Actually, I'd prefer a hardware killswitch on things like camera and microphone.
The problem is that I can get quite lost during this phase, and hot water isn't cheap, so my SO is always threatening to put a big timer in the bathroom.
How many people these days have a dedicated home office, off limits to anyone else? How many partners sleep in different rooms?
Sure, perhaps the sensory experience plays some role, but if your bathroom is reliably the most interruption-free place for you, naturally you’d form a habit of catching up on all the “slow thinking”, most negatively impacted by interruptions, during shower.
I’ve seen people with interruption-free solo hobbies (be that hiking in the woods, motorcycling, rock climbing, etc.) describing similarly mindful experiences, but unlike those shower is the lowest common denominator and perhaps one that happens most routinely.
I now live somewhere that hot water is expensive and I didn’t realize how good things were before.
Considering how much more productive these moments are for me than the bullshit I used to do on my phone and social media, it was an easy decision to make.
Doing any relatively rote act like washing dishes, walking places, etc can also give rise to them. Not having a device in your hand to constantly steal your attention really helps though.
Couldn’t the relaxation be a factor in generating shower thoughts?
I suspect that essentially none of our non-ancestors were predated in a hot spring, unlike walking etc, so there may be an environmental cue driven induced relaxation that doesn’t exist for many other activities.
I suspect it's just about getting the space to relax, which is why I frequently have thoughts when staring at the wall, or taking a walk, or washing dishes, or doing any other myriad activities which are relatively easy on brain processing.
If I’m slouched in my chair, then I’m either completely disengaged or doing something mundane like dealing with email. If I’m upright or sat forward then I’m engaged and executing, but maybe not thinking deeply - I’m doing something I’ve already thought about and decided on. And if I’m on my feet and moving around, often doing some mundane chore like emptying the dishwasher, then I’m likely thinking.
It’s actually a really good illustration of why one size fits all solutions when it comes to work environment and conditions are often so unsatisfactory.
I could never use an app like this. Maybe I should write one that blurs the screen when I don't slouch.
"I'm going to quickly shift from my terminal to this chrome tab to check this documentation but while it loads I'll get a dopamine hit from X."
Blur the screen and help me get back on track...