I Built My Own Wispr Flow to Stop Paying $25/Month
Building a fully local macOS voice dictation app with C++, whisper.cpp, and a Swift menu bar shell — no cloud APIs, no subscriptions, sub-second transcription on Apple Silicon.
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5 posts
Building a fully local macOS voice dictation app with C++, whisper.cpp, and a Swift menu bar shell — no cloud APIs, no subscriptions, sub-second transcription on Apple Silicon.
Solo IDE won Best UI/UX and a $500 prize at the 2026 Startup Week Buildathon. The win came from a real design system — OKLCH colors, shadows over borders, and a 24-file light mode audit at 2am — not from luck.
Taking an existing Rust/Tauri IDE codebase and turning it into a demo-ready product in 72 hours. The sidecar swap, the credential vault, the session isolation bug, and what I learned about brownfield hackathons.
Integrating ElevenLabs realtime STT into a Tauri desktop app through a Rust WebSocket proxy. What I learned about sample rate mismatches, tracing filter gotchas, and why reading API docs carefully is not optional.
Building Solo IDE — a Tauri 2 desktop app with a Rust backend, Node.js sidecar for the Claude Agent SDK, and React frontend. Uses your existing Claude subscription via OAuth instead of pay-per-token API keys.