Another Crazy Experience with AI

A developer used AI to diagnose and fix macOS performance issues, replacing paid third-party apps with custom-built alternatives in under an hour each, resulting in a faster system and lower costs. The user, who built a personal AI assistant named Kai, identified inefficient GPU usage in a custom web app, replaced a file-sharing service with a self-hosted solution, and created a minimalist menu bar stats app called ulbar.io.

Just had another crazy experience with AI last week. One of the types that reminds me that we're living in different times. I have been suffering for months with some pretty serious macOS performance issues. My GPU bar was always pegged. I was having massive CPU spiking issues, and in general my UI felt massively slow. Raycast took forever to load. It took forever to find things, and even after I selected something, it still took forever to actually happen. And I kind of intuitively knew that there was something just rotten about the system. So yesterday I decided to fix it, finally. I had Kai, my Digital Assistant /blog/personal-ais-will-mediate-everything , walk me through a troubleshooting process. So what I thought was a Chrome issue turned out to be one of the custom web applications that I had built was doing some really inefficient GPU usage. So I fixed that in like 10 minutes. And then I have been paying for one service that helps me share files with people of whatever size. Just by doing a keyboard shortcut or a right-click menu selection. I was paying a few hundred bucks for this per year, but it's also another app that is running. So I remade that app myself /blog/ai-enabled-self-software , hosted within my own infrastructure, within like an hour. So now I can share files basically for free and the app is basically zero performance cost. Then I realized that my Stats app in the menu bar was taking a decent amount of resources. And iStat Menus does as well. So I remade that app, which is now ulbar.io https://ulbar.io . Super fast and minimalist replacement. Oh, it also realized that I had a bunch of macOS widgets for FindMy and Weather and that those were seriously junking things up too. Well, after making these few changes, I am now spending less money per year, and my system is lightning fast. It's like I have a completely new computer. Raycast has zero problems. Wispr Flow is working way better. All my apps are massively improved, and I've turned the whole concept into a skill that actually runs regularly to see if I have anything chugging up the system. It's absolutely insane that I could just replace things that are macOS apps myself in less than an hour, including having a website, showing it off, and even selling it if I want to. Again, all in less than an hour. I feel like tech right now is as different from five years ago as five years ago was from twenty years ago. 🤯