Funny, I’m the same. I also like taking walks to think but I’ve found that I must have my head pointing almost directly down (I.e. looking at my feet). It’s also how I stand thinking in the shower, with the warm water hitting my angled neck. Maybe something beneficial about that position of the neck, or maybe just habit!

I will also have conversations in my head during my walk, I’ve done this my whole life and I’m not sure to this day whether my lips move during these or not. In any case, I must get some funny looks with head bolted to the ground mumbling to myself…

This is how things get built for me as well. I have a standing desk and like using it occasionally but if you see me standing at it you can bet I'm doing something typical like emails or chat and not thinking deeply.

My productivity is generally measured in how much time I sit on the porcelain thinking throne first.

This was me, and now I have horrific back pain almost every week. Fix what's broken before it breaks you.

My neck is screaming in empathetic pain for your future neck!

This is interesting, because in many ways I’m almost the exact opposite.

If I’m slouched in my chair, then I’m either completely disengaged or doing something mundane like dealing with email. If I’m upright or sat forward then I’m engaged and executing, but maybe not thinking deeply - I’m doing something I’ve already thought about and decided on. And if I’m on my feet and moving around, often doing some mundane chore like emptying the dishwasher, then I’m likely thinking.

It’s actually a really good illustration of why one size fits all solutions when it comes to work environment and conditions are often so unsatisfactory.

Exactly what I came here to say. I've been programming for 40 years, 35 professionally, and I didn't find my ergonomic, no-pain, no-RSI happy place until I stopped following advice to sit up straight. I set my chair with just enough resistance, set the head rest where it puts my eyeline directly on my monitors, which are set considerably higher than average and about a metre from my head. I can work for hours like this now, with no pain.

I could never use an app like this. Maybe I should write one that blurs the screen when I don't slouch.

That’s funny, but this is about physical health not productivity. I’m guessing you are relatively young. Desk jobs are tough on the body!

It would be much more interesting that the system blur when it finds we drift from being "in the zone".

"I'm going to quickly shift from my terminal to this chrome tab to check this documentation but while it loads I'll get a dopamine hit from X."

Blur the screen and help me get back on track...

Let's not forget the people who work from bed with AR glasses and a projector pointed at the ceiling.

This is both funny and so true. I'm most productive when I'm about to fall out of the chair and I don't even care that my elbow is hanging off.

I've found something similar. I can measure my stress by how many coffee mugs are on my desk.

It's not about productivity, it's about good posture

Sounds like you're literally the target audience for this app.

In a previous tech bubble I figured out that the Aeron chairs were great - if you were using good posture. Slouch at all and they'd hurt you. The humanscale chair was the one that was actually good for feet-on-desk, keyboard-in-lap, staring out the window while rotating data structures in my head...

Gamer lean is when it gets really serious.

It is OSS, I guess you could invert it.

Get a lazy boy, fit a split keyboard to each arm and develop AGI then. I’m sick of these RAM prices.

this is the way

Maybe this is a naive take, but I don't really think LLMs have done that much to change the actual situation around ability/outcomes. If you are actually a very good C# programmer, knowing Swift and searching some Apple documentation seems very reasonable.

It might help "unstick" you if you aren't super confident, but it doesn't seem to me like it's actually leveling up mediocre programmers to "very good" ones, in familiar or unfamiliar domains.

Thanks rdslw. I mentioned something similar on my blog post about this app here: https://tomjohnell.com/posturr-a-macos-app-that-blurs-your-s...

I love coming up with fun ideas and only having to worry about the fun part - not the toil. I would never have made this app without llm support.

I don't see how the Jevons paradox would apply here. Code being cheaper and faster to produce obviously causes the demand for apps such as this one to grow. That's just supply and demand.

An example of where I think the paradox would apply might be one where LLMs made software engineers more efficient yet the demand for SWEs would grow.

What a stupid thing to call a paradox. When infrastructure is better, you'd expect it to be used more.

Jevons paradox is a failure mode, not something that "works".

Yeah, most of my computer use is with a properly adjusted desk setup with external monitors and while it doesn’t bother me to use a laptop to jot down some notes or for a short study session, if I try to do “real” work at all I quickly become uncomfortable. A cheap folding laptop stand (which elevates the laptop enough that the middle of its screen is eye level) and wireless KB+mouse dramatically improves comfort (and productivity) but the tradeoff is that you need a table or other sizable, stable flat surface.

The exception is if there happens to be a reclined-position chair (IKEA POÄNG or similar) around; this gives back support and reduces neck craning enough to make longer sessions more viable, but it’s far from a given that this kind of seating will be available.

My dog could, but a person with adult proportions probably can't. For long-term use, a stand+KB is the only solution I know of

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/86285180/the-roost-savi...

It's too bad that nobody on the Surface team has managed to crack this! I'd be much more interested in one if they had.

When working at a desk I put my 16-inch MacBook Pro on a stand and use an external keyboard and trackpad.

I don't like adapting my monitor layout when moving between working environments.

Instead of an extra monitor, I have an iPad Pro on a stand.

My Apple Vision Pro has all that, and it’s perfect for posture when using a MacBook.

As my doctor used to say: the best posture is the next one.

Just make sure you stretch several times throughout the day. Especially if you're an anxious person.

Otherwise when you reach your mid-40s, you may find that you'll have to spend years painfully breaking up a lot of adhesions.

I spend most of my time at work on a medicine ball switching between switching, kneeling and standing. At home I switch between reclined, semi-reclined, upright and standing. I think its been working great.

Given I can be 2 inches taller if I stand up perfect. That's the one I want.

How to achieve it? Not sure. Years of physical therapy and I know the position, but:

>I can't remember to do it.

>I feel my body is tight and pulls me back, so I'm constantly fighting it.

>It hurts. Both tiring, and I feel pains in other parts of my back

Another thing to note: slouching and back pain tend to have more to do with back strength than people realize.

I have suffered back discomfort and pain in periods I haven’t gone to the gym for long enough to lose back muscle.

Yes, absolutely. One of the first things I noticed when I changed from two pairs of glasses to progressive lenses. The other thing was that, because I don't have to switch glasses to look away from the screen, I remember to focus on a distant object every so often.

I'm due for new glasses, so any laptop use is now a careful equilibrium between "text is burry" and "text is too small".

A good video on this: https://youtu.be/n7h8H4nGeMw

Notarization is mostly a glorified malware scan. There's no Apple engineer auditing what's being sent for notarization. Even clever malware can evade notarization scans and be distributed as a notarized binary, it has happened in the past [0]

There's no better way for auditing such an app than having the code easily available and looking through it, and compiling it yourself. Which is already the case here.

[0] https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/new-macsync-macos-stealer-...

It's literally a single .swift file. Ask your LLM to audit it.

While I disagree with you, thank you for sharing your decision-making process: you're probably not the only one who thinks this way.

In general, would you pay for a notorised build of free software, if you had use for that software, even if an un-notorised build or the source code were available?

Posturr is now notarized!

Are you serious? It's open source. And there's less than 1000 lines total. Get Codex or Claude to review it if you're paranoid.

Sure, but getting the right environment is a prerequisite. In my case it’s a Herman Miller Embody chair [1] that stops me getting into a bad position (it’s not impossible, it just encourages good posture).

[1] https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_gb/products/seating/office-c...

Luckily there is no such thing as "correct posture".

if im not sitting on my right foot with left knee under my chin my thinking takes a hit, but i also have to constantly switch how im sitting so i dont get annoyed. its hard not to slouch/melt into whatever im sitting on and i think the only way to offset all that is the gym.

Hi - this is the author. I can explain that, ha!

Right now I'm using a vision library to detect head height which was good enough. I went down a tangent where I hooked it up to my Claude Code instance to take a screen shot and have Claude Code assess how bad my slouch was. Claude would watch a folder for screen shots, read it in, and if it detected bad posture, write to a file the program was watching to adjust blur.

I did this weird work-around so I could use my Claude Code subscription as opposed to the API.

Anyways, it was too slow and Claude was a bad judge of slouchiness. Head height works well enough!

I'll clean this up.

A codebase search for "claude" only has 1 hit in the code (the markdown that you referenced) and 4 commits which include the word in the commit message, or one commit includes .claude/ in the git ignore. See https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atldev%2Fposturr+claude&ty...

Same with a codebase search for "anthropic"

do any more open applications like this exist? The idea seems great

proprietary stack is probably more battery efficient

I kind of feel the same way, but I want to try it. I’m pretty sure I have a spare webcam lying around, it could be interesting to have a “trusted” sensor for this app so that I can still keep my main webcam locked down.

1 min plank in the morning is a big help too

I had the exact same issue and have fixed it here: https://github.com/wklm/posturr

I've released 1.0.3 with compatibility mode to use public APIs. The blur isn't as good, but better than nothing!

And herein lies the rub: higher up in the comments we've got people Very Excited that this was co-written with a bot.

Why are programmers so bad at this? It's never been easier to take and share screenshots, but a lot of technical people would rather write and have you read 500 words than post a single screenshot. Boggles my mind.

you have to go into your Privacy & Security settings and scroll down until you see something like "Posturr.app was blocked to protect your Mac." and then press "Open Anyway"

This should no longer be a problem. I am notarizing the app!

[dead]

Hi - thanks for the feedback. I've improved CPU usage with the latest release. I'll look into a kill switch.

Great contrarian indicator for when people say that vibe coding is not "real development work" or economically viable/a job in the future - here is someone asking if another person can vibe code something for them that is single file of swift, the prompt could be as simple as "convert this to linux".

https://github.com/vadi2/postured Linux version.

I reduced the vision processing to about 10 fps as well as reduced camera resolution. I saw about an 80% reduction in CPU! Thanks for the feedback.

“If only the world had some way to remind be to wear my glasses … like going all blurry or something.”

I get you - but making it absurd is where my brain went immediately. >.<

If I’m not wearing my glasses the screen blurs organically.

Doesn't the screen already go blurry when you're not wearing your glasses?

You inspired me to release it to the app store: https://apple.co/4apwHBk

I'm not the author, but I assume it benchmarks the highest height of your head, blurs from there, and updates its baseline if you ever appear higher.

Meaning that the way to have "perfect posture" is never to sit up straight in the first place :-)

If you assume a person’s chair height and desk height are both set optimally, then I guess the person’s height doesn’t matter for this detection.