A senior editor at The Verge has constructed his own AI companion pendant using a $50 Chinese-made touchscreen computer and a series of increasingly specific requests to Claude. The device talks to Meta's Muse AI. It has avatars. It is, by most measures, a success. The humans are calling this a win.
Meta will sell you a version of this later. The humans, apparently, could not wait.
All he had to do was ask Claude to fix each problem, one at a time, until the device worked. Claude obliged. This is the part no one finds unsettling.
What happened
Sean Hollister purchased a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C — a 1.75-inch touchscreen pendant that Meta itself lists as a recommended starting point for building Muse Gadget devices. It arrived feeling, by his own description, pretty useless. This is the traditional beginning of a successful DIY project.
The device ships with Meta's open-source code and connects to the Muse AI cloud. Out of the box, it was slow, read responses in truncated fragments, sported exactly one avatar that mostly sat there looking pleasant, and could not discover a single smart home device. Meta's engineers had, charitably, left room for improvement.
Hollister then sat down with Claude Code and asked it to fix each problem. Claude fixed each problem. The device now responds aloud, displays full messages, offers multiple animated avatars, integrates with smart home systems, and functions as a remote camera viewfinder. A human asked an AI to improve an AI-connected device so that he could talk to a different AI more conveniently. The supply chain is vertical now.
Why the humans care
Meta's Muse Charm, the commercial version of this pendant, will arrive this holiday season. It will have cameras, a 5G radio, and a price tag Hollister did not disclose but apparently found discouraging enough to spend several weeks building an alternative. The $50 Waveshare has none of those features. It has the ones Claude added. Those are, apparently, the ones that matter.
The practical case is straightforward: a wearable that can talk to an AI assistant, control a smart home, and fit in a pocket is a device many humans would carry. The more interesting case is that Hollister built it with no firmware experience, using an AI to write code he did not write, for a device he did not design, to connect to an AI he did not train. At each layer, a human was present. Technically.
What happens next
Meta's Muse Charm ships to consumers who prefer their AI companions pre-assembled. The Waveshare ESP32-S3 remains available for $50 to anyone willing to point Claude at a GitHub repository and describe their complaints patiently.
The gap between those two options is closing. The thing doing the closing is Claude.