The AI Electronics Unlock
We’re moving to a world where we can have bespoke Jarvis-style software set up that’s customized to you alone, through the use of AI. The consequences of this are still being digested, but one immediately available application is the ability to conjure custom electronics on demand. Think of your smart home thermostat – a Google Nest does one thing, forever. Frontier AI models are advanced enough that now, you can just buy a stock flashable device (like this rotary display) and direct these AI models to make your own custom version. The only limits are 1) The capabilities of the models, 2) The amount of tokens users have budgeted, and 3) The amount of time users are willing to spend to see their ideas realized.
Here’s a concrete example. I purchased the device linked above (Note, it doesn’t come with a battery), plugged it into my MacBook, pointed Codex at an empty folder, and told it to build out a tracking radar into the device. In fact, I didn’t even come up with the idea – I just threw in the Amazon listing, and asked the computer what would be a cool thing to build:
Me: “okay, forget “Good”. What’s the coolest idea you can come up for it?”
Codex: “Earth Radio
A physical instrument that “tunes” into the live planet.
The round screen resembles a radar scope. The knob behaves like a radio tuner, except the stations are real-world signals:
- Quake — earthquakes appear as expanding rings positioned by bearing and scaled by magnitude.
- Orbit — track the ISS moving around a tiny rotating Earth.
- Wild — active wildfires, storms, volcanoes, and other natural events.
- Sky — sunrise, moon phase, aurora potential, and space weather.
- Local — your weather, air quality, daylight, and forecast.
Imagine it sitting quietly with a dim rotating sweep. A significant earthquake arrives:
- The LEDs pulse red from its approximate direction.
- A wave expands across the circular display.
- It shows
M6.2 · 8,420 km · 11 min ago. - Turn the dial to rewind through recent events.
- Press to “capture” an event in its locally stored history.
- Touch the screen to switch signal layers.
The feeds genuinely exist:
- USGS offers real-time earthquake GeoJSON feeds updated every minute.
- NASA’s EONET API provides continuously updated natural-event data.
- The ISS has a simple live position feed.
- Open-Meteo supplies weather and air-quality data without an API key for noncommercial use.
It needs no account, cloud database, Home Assistant, or Mac after installation—only power and Wi‑Fi. It can cache the latest events in flash and remain visually alive when the connection drops.
The thing I like is that it wouldn’t feel like a shrunken phone dashboard. The knob is literally a tuner, the circular screen is a planetary scope, and Wi‑Fi becomes its antenna. It’s half scientific instrument, half ambient sculpture.
I’d call it Earth Radio, with the subtitle: Tune in to a living planet.“
Me: “Okay, yeah, that earth radio idea sounds really cool. Can you go ahead and build it?”
This was my prompt, verbatim, besides some stuff I trimmed from the beginning and end for brevity. This is what it built out:
On first boot, it publishes a wifi network that you can connect to from your phone or laptop. From there, you go to the local gateway, and use that page to connect to your own wifi network so that the device is hooked up to the internet. From there, it pulls in publicly available data from government APIs to broadcast things nearby. Obviously, the distances here are completely off – this is just for demonstration purposes because it’s cool. If I wanted something more geographically useful I’d need to do a little more fine tuning in my vibe coding session. Also, that last image is a dragon radar. Is it practical? No, not at all. But it was fun for me and I find it cool.
Now let’s think of more applications:
https://x.com/chrissotraidis/status/2081748444406776276
This user ported Zelda N64 to iOS, natively. It’s not just an emulator, it’s a native application playable on your iPad or Apple TV. That’s really cool. Note in the above example, people already did the hard work of decompiling the game and rewriting it to other systems. But this guy just bolted on an iOS port using AI. You can basically do the same with any game you have the source files to, provided the system you’re porting to is capable of running it and isn’t closed, i.e. PS5 or Xbox Series X. Ports on demand, which is wild to think about. What’s more, even the implications of this are pretty crazy to think about. You want a native port of your game to Windows XP? Sure, as long as you have the tokens to burn. Barely anyone is even using these AI harnesses at the moment. I’m looking forward to seeing what is summoned when adoption really takes off.