The comment i see the most on reddit is the refresh rate and the battery life are the deal breaker with the price. Very interested to see the pricing on the steam machine. i was looking forward to it, but looks like it could be over $1000 if they adjust pricing up 40%. but again, id imagine it sells out fast.
answered in show hn post and a github issue. source is coming in a week or so when im back at computer. claude wrote a large portion of the visualizer and im trying to rearchitect how it taps the audio feed and understand it before releasing source. it felt weird to publish code i didnt have a strong hand in. people wanted the player though so i put up the release.
i think its more nuanced than "is" or "isn't." an architect does't pour the concrete. the gap between me or claude comes down to the architectural decisions. take a large functional spec in jira for example, any developer can pick up a ticket, but they aren't steering the product. i have zero issue with claude or anyone doing mundane dev tasks to pull off a product im trying to make. but i guess if you want to say you typed every byte, thats a personal preference. i guess i agree if your one shot prompting software, sure, you're still making but not really coding. i see claude as my agentic pair programmer not "the" developer and most of my software is archicted by me and written the way i would. one thing i like to do is point it at my code bases so it can pick up on my stylistic choices.
honest question, no shade, wasn't that a but your fault for not googling or asking it to consiser existing approaches and solutions? AI will be as dumb as you let it imo. i always ask it to do a bit of research as i craft a plan with it.
its in the issues. i wrote about it. gonna release source in a bit. there are a few parts i want to refactor. the visualizer and the theme editor were heavily done by claude and i want to release source i fully control and understand. tapping the audio source, for example, im still working through it. if you follow the repo you'll get a notification when its online.
I think what I'm getting at is that if you have architectural and engineering experience, coding with claude isn't vibing at all, but like having a paired programming partner. and i think the real headache and heart break is a closed world, top down corporate, web and software experience.
read below? or in the readme. remember when that guy said he loved visual basic 6 and is rediscovering his love of software with claude code? my write up speaks to the same sentiment and personal computing and why i fell in love with technology.
disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.
The 90s and early 00s were an era of personal computing, self-expression, rapid technical expansion, the web. We were barreling forward at the speed of innovation and culture, and for a brief period, the utopia of new media and self-expression were fueled by the imagination. And then... it stopped. Hotline, KaZaa, Lime Wire, Napster, Tumblr, ICQ, AOL Messanger, IRC, Usenet, Winamp... remember WinRAR? All became irelevent really quickly, either due to legal restrictions or gutting of communities and platforms. Many artists have reflected on this, but I feel at this moment in time we're seeing that passion creep back through the cracks of the corporate chokehold on open web.
Light Crime aims to create modern software with a cozier personal computing approach. Spotify is great. Apple Music is meh but no ICE ads, and yet... they still separate you from your media and personal space. All the tools and technologies still exist, sitting dormant, but maybe people have moved on, or recesses to small corners of the web.
When I started coding it was with BASIC and Visual Basic 3. What a joy! But now, with the advent of paired programming with tools like Claude Caude, I don't have to worry about the labor intensive time suck of building something that cuts against the grain of modern technology. What I would have said "eh who is going to use that?" is replaced with "Who cares, I can spend an afternoon and be done with it." So I'm going through my backlog of software and art work I want to see in the world. And am no longer stuck in the mind trap of wondering how it fits into the current culture of social media and peopel's relationship to software.
ahem ... Anyways, I think curating your music on your computer is fun. Making playlists is fun. And generally, just enjoying your computer rather a terminal to SaSS platforms is refreshing in 2026. Enjoy. - chris