WhoIsCooking

WhoIsCooking is a small Mac app that shows the temperature of your Apple Silicon chip and, more specifically, which AI agent is responsible for the heat. It lives in the MacBook notch or in the menu bar, whichever you prefer, and displays the hottest chip sensor together with CPU and GPU load as a quick readout. Below that readout it lists each running agent — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor and others — with its current CPU share, so you can see at a glance whether your machine is busy because of a coding agent, a build, or a browser with too many tabs. The app is aimed at developers who run AI coding agents on their laptops and want to understand and control the thermal cost of that work, and it is sold as a $5 one-time purchase for Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14 or later. The problem the app addresses is stated plainly on its own site: Claude Code, Codex and Cursor start builds, tests and renders that turn a MacBook into a stove. Those jobs are useful, but they push the chip hard, and the user usually has no clear view of which tool is actually responsible. Worse, a single agent session spawns a great deal of child activity — the site describes the alternative as "80 cryptic processes" rather than a comprehensible list. That makes it difficult to attribute heat to a cause, to decide what to pause, or to keep working comfortably. The result is a hot laptop, audible fans, throttling, and a user who either kills the whole session or simply endures it. The first thing WhoIsCooking provides is a readable thermal and load readout. It shows the hottest chip sensor in degrees Celsius, plus the overall CPU and GPU percentages, and labels the state when the machine is hot and throttling. In the example shown on the site, the sensor reads 92°C with CPU at 61% and GPU at 34%, flagged as hot and throttling. Underneath that summary, each agent gets one row: Claude Code shown at 184% while running ffmpeg and python, Codex CLI at 91% during a cargo build, Cursor at 62% as editor and agent, and Chrome with 14 tabs at 23%. Instead of digging through a process list, you see a short, meaningful list of what is consuming your Mac. The second core capability is cooling without killing. Every agent row has its own cool control, and there is a primary "Cool down my Mac" action. Cooling moves heavy work onto the Mac's efficiency cores. The job keeps running — a little slower — while the machine drops roughly 14 degrees; the site frames this as "Same render. 64°C before, 50°C after." Nothing is frozen or closed unless you explicitly ask for it, and your terminal and your apps stay usable the entire time. When you want the power back, clicking Full speed restores everything instantly, and quitting the app always restores full speed as well. That combination makes cooling a reversible, low-risk action rather than a destructive one. WhoIsCooking also watches for work that runs away. You get a nudge when an agent burns CPU for five minutes straight, or when it leaves dev servers running after its session ends — two situations that quietly keep a laptop hot long after the user has moved on. To do this it recognises a specific set of tools: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Aider, Copilot CLI, Ollama and LM Studio, plus Xcode builds, ffmpeg, Docker and your browser. By grouping an agent session and everything it started — builds, tests, dev servers, renders — into a single line, it turns a sprawl of processes into something you can actually reason about. The app is deliberately lightweight in how it works. It reads the chip sensors every 20 seconds and only looks at processes while it is open or while your Mac is hot; idle, it uses about 0% CPU and 14 MB of memory, so the monitoring itself does not add meaningfully to the heat it is trying to reduce. The cooling mechanism does not terminate work: it changes which cores the work runs on, or quits something only when you explicitly choose Quit. The site also notes that the temperature sensors it reads exist only on Apple Silicon, from M1 to M5, so Intel Macs can see CPU use but not temperature. On the safety side, the app is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without warnings. The benefits follow directly from those mechanics. You get a clear attribution of heat to a specific agent rather than a vague sense that the laptop is hot. You get a cooler machine — about 14 degrees in the example given — without losing the build, test or render that you started. You keep a usable terminal and usable apps throughout, and the work stays quiet because it runs on the cooler efficiency cores, even though it takes longer. And you get warning signs for the two failure modes that most often leave a Mac running hot unnoticed: sustained CPU burn and orphaned dev servers. Typical use cases follow the workflows the site describes. A developer running a long cargo build through Codex CLI can see that single row spike, cool that agent down, and keep editing. Someone running ffmpeg or python through Claude Code can move the render onto efficiency cores and let it finish rather than killing it. A user with several agents open at once — Claude Code, Codex CLI and Cursor — can compare their rows and see which one is actually the heat. A user who closed a session but left dev servers running gets a nudge about it instead of discovering the problem an hour later. And anyone working in a quiet room can trade a little speed for a machine that stays quiet. WhoIsCooking is built for developers and other Mac users who run AI coding agents locally and care about laptop temperature, fan noise and battery comfort. It requires an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later; on Intel Macs CPU use is visible but temperature is not. It sits in the notch or the menu bar, and pricing is a single $5 one-time purchase with no subscription. The primary call to action on the site is simply "Find out who's cooking." In short, WhoIsCooking answers a question most Mac users cannot answer on their own — which agent is heating this machine — and then offers a one-click, reversible way to cool it down without stopping the work.