Windows Task Manager Creator Ships TMOG, a Vibe-Coded Cross-Platform Rival Built From a 107-Page Spec

The macOS beta was released on July 31, with Windows and Linux builds following on August 23. A third iteration of the software arrived on September 7, alongside the first builds of the Pro tier. Plummer said the first working version ran on its first try roughly four hours after he fed the spec sheet to the chatbot, and that he did the work while waiting in a hospital with his son, who was recovering from surgery.

TMOG, short for Task Manager OG, packs 12 views into a single window: a summary dashboard, per-process resource use, startup apps, services, power and frequency, network connections, installed apps, disk space and benchmarks. Its status meters animate at 60Hz rather than updating once a second as the Windows tool does, efficiency cores are given their own colors, and retro phosphor themes are available in green, amber and blue. Plummer has promised the app will "never make up an answer."

Each platform runs genuine native code, with Swift and AppKit on macOS, Direct2D on Windows and Qt 6 on Linux, all sharing a C++ core. A self-monitoring option adds TMOG's own process to the readings so users can see what the app itself consumes.

Plummer's stated aim is to make diagnostics easier. The built-in Windows tool is not always much help in explaining why a PC has suddenly slowed, and it is known to misreport CPU usage, while background processes such as Windows Runtime Broker spike resource use without explanation. TMOG addresses this by showing whole-machine history alongside process activity, which makes it easier to trace a problem back to its cause in areas such as compute or memory.

The free version handles live system and process monitoring on all three platforms. Pro adds Flight Recorder, a record-and-replay mode that lets users scrub back through a slowdown as a kind of postmortem. It went on sale through Plummer's own Lemon Squeezy store and cannot be sold through the App Store, because Apple's sandboxing rules forbid apps from listing system processes or terminating other programs.

Plummer has said the project began as an argument over whether anyone could vibe code Microsoft Word. He did not think so, but reasoned that something smaller might work, and as the author of the original Task Manager he knew the subject better than most. "You can't just tell Claude, 'Hey, write a task manager!'" he wrote on X, according to Engadget. "Well, you can, but it'll be hot garbage." He instead assembled the 107-page specification, likening it to the work of "some caffeine-addled PM from the 90s" — a notable comparison from a developer known for hand-optimizing the original tool to roughly 80KB. Where many cross-platform apps wrap a single web app in Electron to cover three operating systems, Plummer wrote native code for each within under six weeks, working with two collaborators and leaning on Claude Code for the bulk of the work.

The software remains in beta, and Plummer says early adopters are still finding bugs for him to fix. The free version does not expire and can be downloaded for macOS, Windows and Linux now without creating an account.