GitNews

Why this exists

We went AI-first at work. Everyone writing code. Designers and developers working toward the product, not their job titles. That meant I was suddenly in GitHub. And GitHub’s notification system is shit.

When AI lets a team produce multiple PRs a day each, the firehose is real. A Slack message arrives: “review this PR.” You open it. No screenshots. Just code. To actually evaluate it, you need to pull the branch locally. All of that context-switching just to figure out if your input is even needed.

I wanted a tool that would tell me when I was actually needed, and let me respond without leaving what I was doing.

What it does

Filters the firehose. The app polls GitHub’s notifications API and classifies everything into three buckets: mentions, reviews, and the rest. Only reviews, mentions, and assignments trigger a native macOS notification. Everything else is available in the dropdown when you want it, not when it arrives.

Runs UX audits. I built an automatic skill that runs heuristic evaluations on PRs. AI can’t do all heuristics perfectly. Some heuristics it handles better than others. But it does enough for a first pass. Developers get feedback. I don’t context-switch. The review pipeline keeps moving.

Became a news tracker. Over time, the app evolved beyond notifications. I added quick-launch tools: terminals, routes, lazy-docker, pages, tabs. It now sits everywhere: desktop, menu bar, browser, showing what’s coming in and going out at a glance. More dashboard than alert system now.

What I learned

I am not a developer. I’m a UXer. I had never made a desktop application before this. The stack is TypeScript and Electron. There are still bugs I need to fix. It pulls all notifications when it should let me restrict what I care about. User settings need work.

But here’s what happened: other people at work saw it and built their own versions. Everyone found what worked for them. It didn’t scale as a product. It scaled as an idea. Sometimes a tool’s job is to show people what’s possible.

I’m planning a second release once I clean up the notification filtering and add proper user settings.

Stack

TypeScript, Electron, GitHub REST API, native macOS menu bar integration.