AI: Apple Music Auto Pause AI assisted app creation on call start

Art by Prakash Kurup - still my favorite whiteboard art by a guy that is dead to me...
AI Generated App Link: Mic Music Pause

Summary:

Have been messing w/ AI mostly for triage of stuff in my daily work.  Has been fantastic and exciting.  A side project I've had in the back of my mind for awhile has been how can I get an app that automatically pauses Apple Music when joining a teams call, then resuming once the call was over.  So I asked AI and it delivered fantastically.   

Details:

All I really did was prompt starting w/ copilot-cli and have a conversation to build this solution.  There are many things that I just don't do on a daily basis that AI helped me fill in gaps in memory and knowledge. 

Here are the prompts I provided to copilot-cli get to a solution you can find on github.  The model I used was Claude Opus 4.8.  Could I have used a different, cheaper model, probably.  

My actual inputs (minus some things I did outside chat that it couldn't do for me):

🎬 Core idea

1. "Is there a way to have Apple Music pause when I start a Teams call, then resume after?" — the original ask.

📦 Making it shareable / brew-installable

2. "Let's make a git repo for this so others can use this. Would like to make it brew installable."

3. "Let's move local repo to  ~/Documents/GitHub/ ."

4. "Why does there need to be two repos?" (app repo + Homebrew tap)

5. "What is the process to merge or provide a tap for anyone to pull via Homebrew?"

6. "Yes please" · 7. "gh auth login" · 8. "done"

7. "Switch to brew services."

8. "Music did not resume" → 11. "yes" (fix)

🎛️ UX & permissions

12. "Can we make this into a Control Center toggle?" (→ landed as a menu-bar app)

13. "Make the permission requests verbose so the person knows exactly why they're granting permission."

🍎 Apple Developer signing

14. "I just signed up for Apple Developer program" 

15. "Check, it shows personal team"

🔊 Other-app audio feature

16. "Add a feature to pause music if a browser begins playing something too — mic by default, optional toggle for non-Apple-Music playback."

17. "Let's test the new version locally."

18–21. Resume-delay tuning: "resume delay seems long" → "still >2s" → "paused" → "reduce poll back to 2s to keep CPU low."

🚀 Signed release automation

22. "OK my dev account is ready" 

23. "yeah set that up" (CI signing/notarization pipeline)

✨ Feature additions

24. "Add a feature to pause music on screen lock." (v0.5.0)

25. "Can we package this as an app for the App Store?" (assessed → stayed direct-distribution; also shipped in-app update check v0.6.0)

26. "Add an option to start at system start-up." (v0.7.0 — SMAppService login-item toggle)

📥 This session

27. "Can we have a packaged app on GitHub so users don't need Xcode tools?" (v0.8.0 — notarized DMG)

28. "Update to a newer revision of Node.js?" → 29. "yes" (v0.8.1 — CI  checkout@v5 )

29. "Make a troubleshooter to call out things like USB mic is active." (v0.9.0 — Diagnostics window)

Result: a signed + notarized macOS menu-bar app at v0.9.0, installable via Homebrew or direct DMG, with auto-pause on calls/other-audio/screen-lock, start-at-login, in-app updates, and a live diagnostics troubleshooter.

Additional Notes:

It's an exciting time.  While AI requires massive amounts of GPU's in crazy datacenters today, so did most early computers.  I can very well see it where things go to a distributed model much like how people consume computers today.  GPU's are expensive and power hungry today.  AI Models are massive.  Things are bound to get more efficient to where we will literally have an AI in our everyday devices personal to us.  

I'm amazed that we are in a Star Trek Next Generation world where the like the crew we can simply state: "Computer, <ask question or do this thing>" is a current beta reality for every day things.

Estimated cost for this?  Approx: $45-$60 not including my time/effort, but just straight cost github AI token costs.  Could've probably done it for cheaper if I optimized by using cheaper model or letting copilot auto select a model for me.

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