It feels like my ability to take a software project from idea to completion has transformed certainly over the past couple of years, even further over just the past few weeks. It's been fun taking a look over some old ideas with fresh eyes, and finishing a "weekend project" like this little utility in a couple of hours. Greyscale is a macOS menu bar app that toggles the screen between color and greyscale.

I wrote this by dictating to Claude Code while out running some errands. By the time I got back to my desk, it was 90% done. Some clean up and a few iterations of a logo later, the project was just about done.

Version 1
v2
v3
Final

Along the way, I figured out that my muscle memory for ⌘K ⌘T D to switch to Visual Studio Code dark mode is an unnecessary habit. There’s a "window.autoDetectColorScheme" setting that’s normally turned off. Turning that on, when macOS goes to dark mode, VSCode will follow.

I also realized I was clicking through VSCode to delete outdated Git branches, so I set up a little git alias to clean up deleted or unused branches locally.

git config --global alias.cleanup \ '!git fetch --prune && git branch -vv | grep ": gone]" | awk "{print \$1}" | xargs git branch -d; echo "Done"'

Now I can run git cleanup and it will automatically:

  • List local branches (git branch -vv)
  • Filter down to branches that have been deleted on GitHub
  • Extract the branch name (awk)
  • Safe-deletes those branches, leaving alone any local changes