❯ cd ~/code.charliegleason.com

I built Pika because, honestly, I wanted to build a Mac App, and it was the pandemic. An ocean of time and a laptop. I'm also a designer, and I liked the idea of doing something around accessibility. Picking a color off the screen should be dead simple. So I built Pika. There's a version of this where I talk about Pika's features - the WCAG contrast checking, the color name lookup, the keyboard shortcuts, the Raycast integration. And those things are genuinely useful. But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is how painful making it was. I spent hours googling, reading documentation, and trying to figure out how to do things in SwiftUI and AppKit and XCodde that should be straightforward but weren't. The friction was exhausting. When you stop thinking about how to do the thing, you start thinking about what you're doing. And that shift - from process to purpose - is where creativity lives. Shipping a macOS app has a lot of overhead. You build, you archive, you sign, you notarize, you wait, you create a DMG, you generate delta updates, you write release notes, you update the Sparkle feed, you push to GitHub, and then you do it all again for the Mac App Store target. It's not hard, exactly. It's just a lot of steps that aren't the interesting part. I'd been using Claude Code for a while, and at some point I had this thought - what if I built a workspace that could handle all of that for me? So I set up a monorepo that pulls together the Pika source, a release tool I built called releasecast, the marketing assets, and the website. Then I wrote Claude Code slash commands - /release, /screenshots, /setup - that orchestrate the whole thing.