Why I built a 15MB SwiftUI menu bar app instead of reaching for Electron

Every developer dashboard I've used is either a browser tab I forget about or an Electron app that eats 200MB of RAM to show me three numbers. I wanted something different. Something that sits quietly in the menu bar, shows me what I need, and gets out of the way. So I built Pulse. The Problem My daily workflow involves juggling multiple AI coding tools — Claude Code, Codex, OpenRouter — each with their own usage dashboard in a separate browser tab. On top of that, I run several local services (Postgres, Redis, a couple of dev servers) that occasionally die without telling anyone. The checking ritual looked like this every morning: Open Claude Code dashboard — check remaining quota Open Codex usage page — check remaining quota Open OpenRouter balance — check remaining credits Run ps aux | grep postgres — is it alive? Hit localhost:6379 — is Redis responding? Five context switches before I've written a single line of code. And if something died overnight, I'd only find out when a build