Last time it was the cables lying to you. You binned the mystery leads, bought the certified ones with the speed and watts printed on the side, labelled the survivors. Good. You fixed the drawer.
Now look at the laptop itself, because it is about to play the same trick on you. Two ports, same oval socket, same confident silver moulding. One is fast. One is not. And nothing on the outside tells you which is which.
This is the technical companion to my earlier post about building Felix, my personal bookmark manager. That post covered the why and what. This one covers the how.I’m not a developer, so these choices came from conversations with Claude Code about what would work best for a local-first personal tool.
Yesterday I built an app. My first ever, not counting some AppleScripts and HyperCard stacks back in the day. I scoped out the requirements during a 10-minute walk, dictating into my iPhone. After running errands I cleaned up the notes at my Mac, fired up Claude Code, and had a working application by evening.
The name comes from Felix the Cat and his “Magic Bag of Tricks” - classic Aussie made cartoon.
My Felix magically collects bookmarks from various sources and transforms them with AI assistance.
There’s a particular kind of technological shift that’s almost impossible to explain to anyone who came after it. Not because it’s complicated, but because the world it changed has vanished so completely that the change itself becomes invisible.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading Seth Godin’s note on the Mac’s 42nd anniversary. He argues, correctly, that the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad wasn’t what saved Apple’s strange new computer. It was the people who made the Mac genuinely better: Guy Kawasaki building the developer ecosystem, Susan Kare designing the icons, the late great Bill Atkinson setting unreasonable standards for the interface. “Hype is a trap,” Seth writes. “Better is better.”
