I Built a Native macOS Transcription App with Codex in Five Days

On July 23, 2026, I opened an empty repository and started building Minute, a private meeting notetaker for macOS. Five days and 124 commits later, version 0.7.0 was available as a private beta for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. I built the application through Codex. I set the product direction, chose the constraints, reviewed the work, and decided what counted as done. Codex inspected the repository, planned implementation slices, wrote and revised the code, ran the test suites, diagnosed failures, captured screenshots, and prepared the release. The result is a native desktop application with a React and TypeScript interface, a Rust backend, live local transcription, local LLM summaries, system-audio capture, meeting detection, search, playback, accessibility coverage, and a checksummed private release pipeline. This is how the work happened, including the parts that broke. What Minute does Minute records a meeting, transcribes it with Whisper, and turns the transcript into a summary,…