Eighteen files compiled, the app appeared in my menu bar, and nothing worked. The 🍅 icon was there. The popover opened. The timer showed 25:00. But clicking Start did nothing. Tapping the tab buttons — Timer, Break, Stats, Settings — nothing. The entire UI was a museum exhibit: look but don't touch. The issue: SwiftUI's default activation model inside an NSPopover doesn't make the popover the key window, so button targets never receive focus. The fix required explicit NSApp.activate(ignoringOtherApps: true) on popover show and rewiring the view hierarchy to use @State-driven tab switching instead of relying on implicit focus. Four minutes, three files rewritten, one rebuild — and the controls came alive. Then the user (me) reported tab label overflow: "Timer," "Break," "Stats," "Settings" crammed into a 330px popover was clipping text. Replaced text labels with SF Symbol icon pills — timer, leaf.fill, chart.bar.fill, gearshape — which fixed the width budget and looked better anyway. In the same pass, the timer's DispatchSourceTimer wasn't initializing on Start because the state machine expected a ready → running transition that the UI wasn't triggering. Wired the button directly to TimerManager.start() and the countdown began ticking. Total debug time from "nothing works" to "everything works": about six minutes. The 14-minute headline is real, but the honest story is 14 minutes to render + 6 minutes to respond.