CozyLog Day 1: The Designer Who Hates Coding, Accidentally Builds a Mac App

You saw the post on Linkedin. Now here’s the full story:
My time tracking obsession spiraled into Rust failures, Cursor breakdowns, SwiftUI discoveries, and my first not-so-accidental Mac app.

This is the full chaotic CozyLog Day 1 devlog, complete with bad decisions, learning moments, and way more coding than a designer should probably attempt.

Hi. I’m not a developer. I don’t like coding. I actively avoid coding. Why do you think I became a designer instead?

So naturally, I found myself… coding.

It all started because I have this extremely charming habit of turning every minor life frustration into a full-on personal project. My latest: where does my time actually go every day? Because listen, I’m unemployed (working on it, okay), but somehow my days feel suspiciously full. Surely I’m not spending six hours doomscrolling LinkedIn. Surely. (Please send help.)

Instead of just downloading one of the many existing time tracking apps like a reasonable person, I said:

"What if I built my own Mac menu bar app?"

Because that sounds like something I definitely have the skills for. (I do not.) I do have a habit where I like to make my life significantly harder "for the plot", and also just because I'm kind of a control freak and want to have MAXIMUM CONTROL over the tools I use.

Enter CozyLog: a tiny time tracker that lets me clock in, pick tasks, take breaks, and eventually judge myself with colorful graphs about how I actually spend my time.

I started vibe-coding inside Cursor. Wrote a whole PRD. Prompted Cursor into oblivion. Got about 50 errors. Prompted some more. Cursor begged me to stop (it literally apologized to me on multiple occasions). Eventually I realized:

"Oh. I have to write code with my own actual hands now."

Side note: Originally, I didn’t even plan to use Xcode. In my infinite ambition (and questionable decision-making), I first tried to build this with Rust because I thought, “Hey, cross-platform! Performance! Hacker vibes!” But after a very painful false start, and the growing realization that I don’t actually know Rust, I admitted defeat and pivoted. Turns out, for something as Mac-native as a menu bar app, SwiftUI and Xcode are… actually pretty reliable. Who knew? Everyone except me, apparently.

Cut to me, opening Xcode with the energy of someone disarming a bomb they've only seen in movies. Armed with 2 YouTube tutorials, lots of pleading with ChatGPT, a prayer, and forcing Cursor to become my new bestie, I got my base menu bar app running. Then, I opened the project back in Cursor, because frankly, Cursor still does a better job than me at writing code, as long as it doesn’t accidentally break my extremely fragile file structure (menu apps are surprisingly picky).

Scary looking code

To prevent Cursor from self-destructing my project, I set up some project rules, guardrails, and tagged relevant Apple docs for context.

Setting up project rules so my project doesn't self-destruct

The logs currently live inside the dropdown menu.

Next up:

• Local data storage

• Multi-day logs

• Regular reminders to drink water and go pee (hyperfixation sessions are no joke for ADHDers)

• Exporting (because obviously I want fancy CSV files I’ll never actually look at)

• Improve on the UI and flow + reduce clicks needed to achieve a task (task on the app not like a real life actual task yk)

To be clear, this project is 100% for me and my own hyperfixation. But I figured other freelancers might also want to know where their time goes before their entire afternoon evaporates into doomscrolling and “accidental research rabbit holes.”

And no, I didn’t check if similar apps exist because that would defeat the entire purpose. I wanted to force myself to build it from scratch, suffer, and learn. And honestly? I’m learning. And suffering. But like, in a fun way, especially with the help of my new best friend, Cursor 🤓

Anyway. This is Day 1 of CozyLog.

Will I survive Swift? Stay tuned.

(definitely shoot me a message if you wanna chat about this :))))

Resources and extra stuff:

This post told me to add documentation:

https://medium.com/ux-planet/vibe-coding-with-cursor-ai-52f5023bc59a

This video taught me how to set up the starter code for a menu bar app:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uszImMe0CsU&t=500s