Five small tools for daily annoyances
A Mac app to keep track of every git repository, a terminal view of the pull requests waiting on me, an on-device translation service, a calibre plugin and a VS Code extension — all built with Claude Opus 5, some of them in a few minutes.
Every working day has its small frictions, the kind you stop noticing because fixing them never seemed worth the effort. Between June and November 2026 I fixed five of mine, with Claude Opus 5 doing most of the writing. A calibre plugin or a VS Code extension used to mean learning an API I would never touch again, for a gain of a few seconds a day; now a small program or a configuration tweak costs about as much as describing what bothers me.
GitRoster
git-roster is the one that grew into a real application. I work across a lot of repositories, personal and professional, and kept discovering too late that one of them was behind its remote or had changes I had forgotten about. GitRoster is a single macOS window listing all of them, with the branch and its state on each row, a click away from opening any of them in my git client, a terminal, the editor or the browser. It pulls and pushes when the way is clear and otherwise shows me what git said and leaves the decision to me.
It also had to behave like an application rather than a script with a window, which is what the few iterations it went through were about — picking up the same git and credentials I use in the terminal, never hanging on a password prompt I cannot see, and shipping as a signed, notarised app that opens on another Mac without complaint. All of it took a couple of hours of my time; a couple of years ago this is the kind of thing I would have paid for as shareware.
The smaller ones
gh-pr-toolisprs, a terminal command listing the pull requests waiting on me at work and which of them are actually ready to look at, each with a single status such as conflicts, checks failing or ready to merge. I run it throughout the day: with AI in the loop we open many more pull requests than we used to, across several projects at once, and it had become easy to lose track of them.translation-serviceadds Translate Selection to the macOS Services menu and shows the translation in a small popup next to the selected text. It uses Apple’s on-device translation, so nothing leaves the machine.calibre-tag-togglelets me tag books in my calibre library from a menu, several at a time, and shows which of the selected books already carry each tag.vscode-auto-close-markdown-previewkeeps Markdown on the left of VS Code and its preview on the right, and closes the preview when I move on to something else, instead of leaving me a trail of stale preview tabs to clean up.
Some of these took a few minutes, from describing the problem to having it installed.
Was it worth it?
Yes. The four small ones each remove an irritation I would otherwise have lived with, and GitRoster is open on my machines all day, keeping every repository up to date while I work without my having to think about it.
dmorel69— Swift, Python, TypeScript, calibre, VS Code