So… my Mac’s emoji picker stopped working.

Not just once. Not a one-off glitch. It straight up gave up on life.

You know the usual shortcut — Control + Command + Space?

Nothing. No popup. No cute little smiley face. Nada.

And before you ask — yes, I tried restarting, clearing caches, even the weird Terminal fixes from Reddit threads that looked like they were typed in 2007. Still broken.

Problem-Solving Mode Activated

Now, if you’ve known me for a while, you’ll know I can’t leave things broken — especially when it’s something this small, this dumb, and this persistent. So I had two options:

1. Be annoyed forever.

2. Build my own solution.

Guess which one I picked? 😏

“If it's not broken, it's time for a beer.” - Alvin Poh

Enter: Cursor AI + Maccy

I’d been wanting to build a macOS app for a while anyway — and this felt like the perfect little sandbox project.

I started with Maccy, which is an open-source clipboard manager for macOS. Super clean, minimal, and actually written in Swift — perfect for what I had in mind.

But here’s where things got interesting:

Instead of coding the entire thing from scratch (which would’ve taken forever and probably led me to rage-quit halfway), I decided to try using Cursor AI.

If you haven’t used it before, Cursor is basically VSCode with AI baked into it. Think GitHub Copilot, but with a supercharged chat assistant that understands your whole codebase. It’s like having an engineer friend who never sleeps.

Teaching Cursor to Build the Emoji Picker

I forked Maccy and then literally said to Cursor:

“Add an emoji picker to this app. I want to be able to select emojis and paste them like clipboard history items.”

And boom — it started generating Swift code like a boss.

Sure, I had to tweak things here and there, and there were moments where Cursor hallucinated a bit (classic), but overall? It felt like I was pair programming with an insanely fast assistant who never complains.

I got the emoji picker up and running within a few hours.

The Result?

A simple, clean fully working macOS clipboard history manager with an emoji picker — built for my own sanity.

But here’s what made this whole thing feel magical:

• I didn’t write most of the code by hand.

• I didn’t need to Google every single SwiftUI quirk.

• I didn’t need to wait for macOS to fix itself.

I just decided: Screw it, I’ll build it myself — and AI helped me get there faster than I expected.

Why I’m Sharing This

Not because I think everyone should go build their own emoji picker (though if you want it, I might share it).

But because this tiny project reminded me of a deeper lesson:

“Sometimes, the best tools come from scratching your own itch.” - Alvin Poh

That moment of friction — the broken emoji picker — turned into a project I actually had fun building. And now I’ve got a tool I’ll use every day, made just for me.

Plus, I learned a bit more about macOS development, open-source tooling, and what AI-assisted coding can really do.

If you’re thinking of building something — even something small — maybe this is your sign to just start. You don’t need to know everything. You just need to be curious enough to try.