alt Hacker NewsI'm going to assume Claude did the heavy lifting here (because it's Q4 2026 and the odds are in my favor), so if I'm right: this is one of the best examples of the way LLMs can empower users to not only scratch all the itches, but demonstrate to anyone who stumbles by just how satisfying it can be to do so themselves.
Your app represents a future that I, an old, actually love. When I see projects like this, I don't think about ongoing support or if the project will be abandoned. I think, "Woah, I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm going to try it. Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"
Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.
And if you wrote it by hand, my hat's off to you for sharing that, too.
Replies
ChatGPT, but close! You're right, I likely wouldn't have approached the project if I had to write it all by hand. But it was fairly easy with AI, and I was impressed with the results. The days of personalized software are here. I built it exactly to my spec - similar to Adobe suite, and with built in MCP support.
I get assuming that it's LLM-made, but why assume it's your specific model by a certain company? It's so weird to me when people bring up Claude as the 'default', although I get that those models are among the most popular right now.
I've said this before, but I'll say this again, but LLMs are the first time most people have used a computer as a computer. Myself included.
LLMs are realizing the potential of the computer revolution.
Those heady dreams of Xanadu, Xerox PARC, Douglas Engelbart, and Bret Victor today? They're finally possible.
>Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"
Or alternatively... why wouldn't the device OEM add support for <new feature> on <ancient garbage> if it's just a few tokens away.
>Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.
Working in industry killed my desire to do any sort of computer stuff on the side. With AI handling the grunt work of setting up tooling and writing the bulk of the code I've started doing stuff again.
Imagine if RMS had access to Claude and wasn't activated by the need to modify printer software himself. We might not have the FSF, GNU, GPL, or anything downstream from those!
So how much would you pay to be able to do that? $30, 40, 100? Once they IPO, they'll find out exactly how much they can sell the same things back to you for.
It's cool, and it's nice to see people rebelling against the "hardware I bought held hostage to a subscription" business model, but if you use an AI to do this and don't understand what it's done, you've just traded one subscription dependency for another.
Claude seems to be backing out of doing this kind of thing. It didn't want to create a fake server so I could flash my camera. I argued with it about how where I live I have the legal right to do this. It agreed but still wouldn't do it.
Codex did it and flashed it in 1 minute.
I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.
The more people do stuff like this, the better. Subscription based e-waste is awful.