Hoisting the black flag

Pirates don’t fight for medals — they fight for freedom. That’s the whole idea behind The Black Flagger: small, sharp Mac apps made the way we’d want to use them, and notes from the voyage along the way.

What this blog is for

Short posts about the things we build and the decisions behind them:

• Why an app works the way it does
• What we learned shipping it
• The occasional deep dive into a detail nobody asked about

What it isn’t

No growth-hacking, no ten-step funnels. Just honest notes. If a post ever reads like an ad, we got it wrong.

Chase the work like buried treasure — until the thing in your hands is truly well-made.

First up: BlackFlare

BlackFlare is out — a native macOS menu bar app for developers running Claude Code and Codex.

It starts with the dumbest way to lose a night of work: you kick off a long run, step away, and your Mac falls asleep. A sleeping Mac is a stalled agent. BlackFlare keeps your Mac awake while a session runs, then lets it sleep normally the moment the work is done.

And you don’t have to babysit the terminal either. The instant a session finishes — or needs your input — BlackFlare pings you: on your desktop, or forwarded to Telegram or Slack so you can go touch some grass.

The menu bar is also mission control for your defaults — model, permission mode, effort level — and it keeps your plan usage in plain sight, with a heads-up before you cross a threshold you set. All of it on-device: no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry.

The full story lives on its own site, blackflare.dev — or jump straight to the docs.

More soon. 🏴‍☠️