Monday Grind Blueprint · #15

I Spent the Weekend Trying to Break My Own App on Purpose

It broke, and froze my entire computer. Good. Better me than you.

By Marcin Firmuga·2026-07-06·4 min read·Monday Grind Blueprint #15

PC Workman v1.8.2 is live, now on the Microsoft Store and everywhere else.

Before pushing a new build to the Store, I do not just click around and call it tested. This weekend I ran PC Workman through the scenarios that actually hurt a machine: CPU pinned at 100%, RAM under real pressure, a throttling laptop, hours-long sessions, and switching pages as fast as I could.

One of them caught something serious on my own machine: after a while under load, a total freeze. White screen, dead desktop, restart to recover. Nobody reported it. I found it myself before it ever reached a user, which is exactly the point of testing this way.

The cause was one missing guard. My optimizer would suspend idle processes to save resources, but nothing stopped it from suspending dwm.exe, the process that literally draws your screen, or PC Workman freezing its own process. It never checked.

Now it does, at the lowest level, so every optimization path is safe at once. Full autopsy on Wednesday.

What v1.8.2 ships

A monitor that can freeze the computer it is monitoring is not a monitor. As of today, it does not.

BuildInPublicPythonAIOpenSource
This is the project behind the post. PC Workman is a free, open-source Windows system monitor with an offline AI assistant - everything described here is real, shipped code. Download it or read the source.
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MF

Marcin Firmuga

Solo developer · HCK_Labs · building PC Workman in public

Every edition is written from that week's real commits. Newest posts premiere on LinkedIn - the archive lives here. More about me: my story.