Haven’t started, still in the planning phase, but I want to build a Tamagotchi for readers. I’m calling it Tome & Tail: a little black dragon living in a pixel-art library on an ESP32-S3 with a small round AMOLED screen.
You’d start a reading session and the dragon would read alongside you. What you read would influence its appearance and habits; lots of sci-fi might give it starry wings, for example. It won’t die if you go a week without reading.
The plan is to keep it playable offline, with optional syncing to Booklary, the reading tracker I’m building. I’m leaning toward C++, which I never used, so it’ll be a learning experience.
Currently waiting for the Waveshare board to arrive so I can start development, and looking for an artist to commission the pixel art. Used GPT to design a concept[1], which I’ll use as examples to the artist.
This will be my first ESP32 project, so getting the dragon blinking on screen is the first milestone.
Cool idea - I forgot where I found it but there was a cute dragon Tamagotchi clone that I found for Arduino a few years ago.
For ESP32 - recommend paying close attention to the FreeRtos, it's seriously powerful. Even if you are just using Arduino style code you can use it for background scheduling and interrupts (for your api and buttons for example), as well as dual core use on S3.
If I remember correctly, the code base left a lot to be desired on the one I tried - it was fun but wasn't very adaptable. I'm sure you can do a better job
Same here. 5.5 would sometimes oneshot relatively complex models even without MCP. Opus, however, even with Fusion 360 MCP access would usually make comically bad models. It seemed that Opus tried to reason through the problem while GPT would come up with a general plan of using whatever tools were available to solve the problem. In chat, it would use the available Python and trimesh. It was also the only time I had ChatGPT work on something for over 30 min without giving up.
Given that Fable is the only one that fucking listens to me and writes proper Go code, that’s what I use for everything code-related. At least on my personal projects.
If I don’t care about the code, i.e. I’m writing something quick just to test something, I’ll use GPT Astra to save my Fable tokens. For conversations and research I usually go with GPT Astra Pro.
For Home Assistant I use a combination of Grok 4.20 and DeepSeek Flash 4.1. Grok as a voice assistant, because it’s the only model with good latency here in Brazil (it’s nearly instant), and DeepSeek for everything else.
I don’t really use LLMs for writing, but I’m writing a fiction book on the side, and when I tried to use one for ideas, Gemini Flash 3.8 gave me the closest to good writing out of the ones I tested. Not enough for me to use it for the task, though.
Really wish they'd release a version that works with the thinking disabled, so I could use it as a voice assistant. Thinking, even set to low, adds way too much latency to be useful for this task.
I built an MCP server for my voice assistant. By default, Home Assistant offers a few tools to the models, but I felt like it was missing some, so I built it.
It has tools to get real jokes, do math, unit conversion, get stock information, search the web with Kagi, and other things I consider to be essential in a voice assistant. It even got approved by my wife.
At work I use our MCP server to debug and troubleshoot issues with our code too. Just yesterday I used it to figure out why a tag wasn’t showing up in traces; using the MCP server, the LLM was able to see that the tag was present in parent traces, but was lost along the way, and figured out why.
Could I find that without the MCP server? Yes, but I’d take me hours of going through lengthy traces, while the MCP and LLM found the issue in minutes.
I got a Pebble Index 01 ring and it has support for custom MCP servers. I run one on Tailscale and it can interact with Home Assistant, my home issue tracker, my Anki setup, etc.
I've come full circle on MCP. With agents with a shell tool they quickly became unnecessary but these days I've been coming up with more agentic use cases where I don't want to give the agent a shell, and a narrower MCP interface is a great fit.
"What amps and charging schedule should I set my EV to charge at, so that at peak electricity rate time my house battery is at 90%." Looks at my house battery, car battery, current weather forecast, and house solar production, all of which are integrated into my Home Assistant. Looks at my gmail calendar. "16 amps, 9:30am-3:30pm, higher than usual because you're driving to lunch from 11am-12pm" (shows math). It can even go ahead and set it for me but I haven't given it read/write access to my car yet.
I don't know about others, but I use JSON because it's in the standard Go library, and most of the times, I rather use something weird than add a dependency.
I paid an actual designer to come up with a design system for my project, which I then made Claude follow. Works like a charm.
To give more details, the designer created the system in Figma and created a guideline document for a human to follow on how to use the system. I then gave those files to Claude Fable using Claude Design to turn it into code.
Then when I need to do anything design-related in the project, I make Claude follow the system. And I can use the guidelines to see if it’s following everything correctly or not.
With SourceHut banning projects that use LLMs[1], I’m looking to migrate this weekend.
While I can host Forgejo just fine[2], doing so means no one will be able to contribute to the projects, since federation isn’t a thing yet. Heck, getting contributions on SourceHut was hard enough, and it doesn’t even require people to register an account.
I might need to bite the bullet and go with GitHub. Regardless of what I think about the company and Microsoft, it’s where the people are.
Oh my. I hadn't noticed this, but I've been kind of expecting it. I've been a big SourceHut user for years now. So I'll be having to decide what to do myself. I absolutely get their stance, but I don't see a world in which I will go back to writing meaningful amounts of code by hand again.
I may try out tangled.sh. It's really nice to have my code stored and backed up somewhere other than infra I control and manage.
I'm personally pretty excited about Tangled (and ATProto in general), but I do have to caution that I've had some performance issues and some technical ones with hosting my own 'knot' and 'spindle' services
It ridiculous, Codeberg did the same. I get why, really, I do, but it's creating a severe damage that will be abused by a third evil actor that will take over the wasteland of GitHub and GitLab by creating a service that will allow anything (until it is enshittified of course)
Outcome? Everyone on their own self-hosted git servers, zero collaboration.
> Outcome? Everyone on their own self-hosted git servers, zero collaboration.
Everyone sticking to Github, then a year or two from now Github resolves their scaling issues and the competitors miss their window of opportunity to disrupt
Not if they keep putting everything behind a paywall. I'm not going to pay 60 (20/user/month) euros per month to be able to restrict pushes to main. It's absurd. Sorry, this specifically gets my blood boiling so I might be a bit more aggressive than needed.
What kind of collaboration were you getting on your random GitHub uploads? I didn't get any. This collaboration thing seems like an excuse if people have a way to contact you.
Codeberg only banned projects that are majority LLM-coded. They did not ban all use of LLMs.
It seems my eyes skipped the part of "[...]mostly consist of code written by generative AIs[...]" my bad. Which means I have to apologize twice, because of the other comment. Damn, good slap in the face xD
Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot.
It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
I can also turn on lights, the TV, the AC, ask about the weather, and other basic assistant stuff, ofc.
> It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
So basically you're using it as an AI mother in law, nice.
There is an application for Reachy that makes it so you can connect to Home Assistant, but it's broken and seems abandoned, so I forked it, fixed it, and customized it. That gets you 80% of the way. The rest is based on automations built inside Home Assistant.
And since Reachy's software and SDK are pretty open, it's trivial for a coding agent to learn how to communicate with the robot to achieve your desired outcome.
Fable is the only one that follows my instructions correctly, which I find quite important. It takes STYLE.md and SPEC.md as law, and code just like I would code, with the same mistakes and all.
I just can't get Opus (Opus 5 is dumb as a rock, to be fair) or Sol to do that, so I exclusively use Fable for personal work. When I reach my weekly limit, usually on the last day close to the reset, I just go back to coding by hand ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Heck, it even does security reviews and fixes, as long as I don't ask it to "attack" the codebase. I'm planning on using Kimi or GLM for that part.
You’d start a reading session and the dragon would read alongside you. What you read would influence its appearance and habits; lots of sci-fi might give it starry wings, for example. It won’t die if you go a week without reading.
The plan is to keep it playable offline, with optional syncing to Booklary, the reading tracker I’m building. I’m leaning toward C++, which I never used, so it’ll be a learning experience.
Currently waiting for the Waveshare board to arrive so I can start development, and looking for an artist to commission the pixel art. Used GPT to design a concept[1], which I’ll use as examples to the artist.
This will be my first ESP32 project, so getting the dragon blinking on screen is the first milestone.
[1]: https://i.cpimg.sh/57EC5380-0FF7-4646-A943-971350FF98D2.png
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