Notes

PSA for macOS dev/testing: be very careful letting coding agents run tccutil, especially with broad permissions.

Codex ran tccutil reset Accessibility instead of resetting permissions for a specific app. That wiped Accessibility grants across all apps, broke input/control permissions, triggered WindowServer/HID weirdness, and made keyboard/clicks appear partially dead until sleep/wake, followed by a full reboot.

Thankfully this happened inside a macOS VM and not on my host machine.

AI coding agents have made tinkering absurdly cheap (quality is rough, but improving fast).

Forked Rectangle to add shortcut cycling the way I wanted it. Patched Codex to override the shell PATH. Without AI, neither was worth my time. Now it’s an evening.

And it’s still cheating, because I’m an engineer. Wait until my mom can do this.

Note to future self and PSA for anyone buying a Mac Mini to sandbox coding agents inside a macOS VM:

• 32GB RAM is tight. A macOS VM for Xcode + simulators realistically needs ~16GB allocated to it, leaving little room for the host and additional Linux VMs/containers for agents.
• 256GB SSD disappears fast between Xcode, simulators, caches, and VM disks (1TB upgrade already on the way)
• Get 10GbE (if your network supports it). Once the Mini becomes a remote VM host, 1GbE screen sharing feels choppy. You cannot upgrade it later.

*Does not apply if you are yolo-running agents directly on the host.

Nobody talks about how hard it is to ship open source.

Prototyping is Fun. Immersive. Exciting.

Then comes packaging, docs, CI/CD, bugs you can’t reproduce, edge cases you never imagined. Tedious. Frustrating. Endless.

No wonder they say: the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90%.