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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Two weeks ago I told Claude “I have a <wifi outlet relay> on the LAN at <IP>. Assume direct control of it.” And about 8 command approvals later I had a new firmware running on it.

Mind you, it found and used an existing firmware flashing library for this family of devices. But it felt amazing to do in 20 mins what would probably have been hours and hours of research and tinkering that I wasn’t interested in. I just wanted a WiFi lava lamp.

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Surprising. I have hit its BS guardrails a lot lately, working on my vintage computers from the 80s and early 90s. Just about done with Claude.

You can’t be loyal to these things. I ditched ChatGPT during the peak Claude hype after Christmas.

I feel like Claude has shittified a bit and ChatGPT is good and fast. Gemini remains mediocre, although it seems Google AI energy is directed elsewhere.

Just sign up with something like openrouter and keep switching models until one completes the task.

Paying by the token is a much more expensive way of doing it than signing up for the various coding plans when you need them.

Not if the models are way cheaper. For many tasks you can do with DeepSeek Flash, and for more gnarly problems you switch to GLM or Kimi. But sure, if you do everything in large models like Kimi K3 or GLM it gets expensive quickly.

I’ve been doing this with Qwen 3.8 27B with success. Kindle, Android Tablet, and Raspberry Pi all working better and fully owned thanks to agentic help. No issues with hitting the guardrails here ofc.

What about Raspberry Pi is not open?

kimi k3 is wonderful, I suggest you give it or GLM a try when you get the chance, I just use openrouter or cursor

What were you trying to do with vintage computers?

In this case, get an ancient VAXstation running with VAX LISP so I could port my Z-machine interpreter from CLOS to their CLtL flavors implementation and try to get Zork and other games running on it. But goodness forbid you ask Claude for help with 35 year old software without hitting their guardrails.

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