Personal Pomodoro: Gemini 3.7 Flash Builds a Native Mac App
Testing a model's ceiling by asking it to build a complete macOS menu bar Pomodoro timer — penalty engine, break micro-tasks, stats dashboard — in a single Antigravity session.
Default state. Classic Focus at 25 minutes, Quick Sprint, Deep Work, and custom presets. The 🍅 lives in your menu bar.
A focused model evaluation disguised as a productivity tool. The test: give Gemini 3.7 Flash a non-trivial native macOS app to build from scratch — not a web app, not a script, but a real SwiftUI menu bar application with SPM, AppKit integration, and system-level features — and see how far it gets without intervention.
It got all the way. 18 Swift files across a clean Models/Services/Views architecture, a snooze penalty engine with escalating consequences, 8 curated break micro-tasks, a daily stats dashboard with midnight resets, a sound system wrapping NSSound with live preview, and full preference persistence via UserDefaults. The app runs dockless as a pure LSUIElement accessory — no Dock icon, just a 🍅 in the menu bar that opens a glass popover. The entire build happened in a single session on August 14, 2026.
Timeline
Tested Gemini 3.7 Flash by asking it to build a native macOS Pomodoro timer from scratch — and it delivered a complete menu bar app in a single session. 18 Swift files, zero external dependencies, running dockless via NSApp.setActivationPolicy(.accessory). The app lives in the macOS status bar as a 🍅 icon, opens a 330×550 glass popover with NSPopover, and ticks down via DispatchSourceTimer at 250ms intervals against a wall-clock targetEndDate so the countdown stays accurate even if the system sleeps. The model chose SPM over Xcode, wired MenuBarController through Combine's objectWillChange to keep the menu bar title reactive, and even handled click-outside-to-dismiss with a global event monitor. No hand-holding, no corrections — the architecture decisions were the model's.
The difference between a Pomodoro app you use once and one you keep running is accountability — so the model built a penalty engine. Two free snoozes per session, no judgment. Hit snooze a third time and consequences escalate: a random physical challenge (20 squats, 15 push-ups, 45-second plank, 30 jumping jacks, 1-minute wall sit, or 25 high knees), a 50% break time tax, or a hard lockout that disables the snooze button entirely. There's a maximumDiscipline mode that applies all three. The penalty state tracks snooze count, manages challenge assignment via PenaltyChallenge.randomChallenge(), and resets cleanly between sessions. The menu bar icon swaps from 🍅 to ⚠️ when a penalty is active — a small visual shame signal that's surprisingly effective. Alongside this, the model generated 8 curated break micro-tasks across 7 categories — hydration, stretching, 20-20-20 eye relief, box breathing, desk tidying — each with specific instructions and time estimates. The break task system supports custom entries too.
The last batch of files rounded out the app — daily stats tracking, a sound system with 6 chime options, and the polish to make it feel native. The StatsView tracks completed pomodoros, total focus time, snooze count, penalties incurred, and break tasks checked off, all persisted through UserDefaults via a StorageService singleton that resets at midnight. The sound system wraps NSSound with system chimes (Glass, Ping, Hero, Bottle, Submarine, Tink) and includes a live preview in the settings panel. Every user preference — focus duration, break lengths, snooze increment, penalty policy, sound selection, menu bar display mode — persists across launches. The app runs as a pure LSUIElement accessory: no Dock icon, no window chrome, just a menu bar popover with a tabbed interface (Timer, Break, Stats, Settings) navigated via SF Symbol icon pills. make run builds and launches it. Gemini 3.7 Flash wrote all of this unprompted — 18 files across Models, Services, and Views, with clean separation of concerns and zero compile errors.