Release Notes: Week 4

Side Projects

Claudio

A native macOS menu bar app that gives Claude a voice interface. 15 commits this week.

What it does: Monitors the brabble voice daemon, displays live transcription, shows processing status, and maintains conversation history. Say "Hey Claude" and talk instead of type.

This week's features:

• Streaming voice response option
• MCP server status display in settings and menu bar
• Custom wake commands for voice triggers
• Agentic mode for voice-triggered tool execution
• Screen context awareness (Claude can see what you're looking at)
• Custom app icon with speech bubble and waveform design

Built with SwiftUI, using the @Observable pattern and DispatchSource for file watching.

Pastey

A macOS clipboard history manager, polished to Raycast-level quality.

What it does: Runs in the menu bar with a global hotkey. Stores text, images, files, and URLs. Search your clipboard history, pin favorites, and paste with a keystroke.

This week's work (41KB rewrite of ClipboardWindowController):

• Created centralized DesignSystem.swift with design tokens
• Added hover state tracking via NSTrackingArea
• Reduced row heights from 46px to 38px (compact density)
• Icon + keyboard hint pill toolbar buttons
• Monospace font in text preview
• Type pills with semantic colors per content type

Also has a local HTTP API and CLI for tooling integration.

cchist

A CLI tool to search Claude Code conversation history.

The problem: "What was I working on yesterday?" After dozens of sessions, context gets lost.

The solution:

cchist search "shopping cart" --days 7
cchist list --days 3
cchist read <session-id>

Solves the recovery problem when picking up work across sessions.

Client Work

Asset management prototype: Built a shopping cart feature for the search prototype. Multi-select with shift/cmd-click, cart panel with version and variant controls, context-aware actions based on the user's current show. ~900 lines added. The interaction model borrows from e-commerce but adapts to how artists actually work with digital assets.

PM coaching: Working with a junior PM on discovery methodology. Created interview guides with redirect scripts (for when conversations go off-track), practitioner session plans, and updated the coaching roadmap for Q1. The goal: build his instincts for separating signal from noise in user research.

Personal Site

• Built /blog section with series system (General, Release Notes, Ctrl-Alt-Elite)
• Redesigned experience table with Impact and Skills columns
• Added product leader modal explaining my role
• Published first Ctrl-Alt-Elite post (Keyframe Model)

Thought Leadership

Keyframe Model video: Created a Remotion video about Dave McMahon's storyboard approach to AI pitches. UGC-style with keyword highlighting and progress bars. Research-backed timing at 210 WPM. Embedded in the Ctrl-Alt-Elite post.

How I'm Using AI

Tools: Read/Write/Edit in every session. Bash for CLI and git. WebSearch for research.

Skills: product-coaching, julie-zhuo-coach, marty-cagan-coach, skill-creator, web-design-guidelines, react-best-practices

Pattern: Heavy investment in tool-building (Claudio, Pastey, cchist). This is my "architect systems" tendency. Productive, but easy to over-index on infrastructure vs. direct output.