Nudge lives in the Mac menu bar and coaches people who work with Claude Code and Codex, so they hit their plan limits less often. I designed and built it on my own.
From tracker to coach
My first version was a tracker: limit bars, a pace forecast, and alerts at 50, 80 and 95%. It showed a number and left you to work out what to do about it. I rebuilt it around a single card called Next step, which names the one thing worth doing before you send the next message.
One thing to do
A long chat re-reads everything on every message, so the most useful card became its own feature. Start fresh asks the chat for a summary, saves it, and opens a new chat from that summary in one click. Advice that keeps coming back can be applied for you, with your OK and an Undo.
The stage
The top of the panel is one sentence about right now, set in a serif on smoked glass over a field of dots. Each reply lands as a ripple. Numbers and words draw themselves in dots.
Cutting the rain
The first stage redrew 60 times a second, even with the panel closed, and kept about 30% of a CPU core busy. Nudge now idles at about 0% CPU with the panel closed and about 1% open.
Quiet by default
One question per tab: Now and Week. The accent is the system blue, and coral is left for Claude. Nudge reads chats on your Mac and never sends them anywhere.
Role: designer and developer. Team: solo. Platform: macOS 26+.
0 likes · 0 views · Nov 12, 2026
A Mac menu bar app that tells you the one thing to do next, so you hit your AI usage limit less often. Designed and built solo in SwiftUI.
