# A reporter with zero coding experience vibe-coded his own Muse Charm for $50

> The Verge's Sean Hollister bought a Meta-approved ESP32 devkit and let Claude Code turn it into a talking, Tamagotchi-style AI pendant. He has no idea if the code is any good.

- URL: https://dev.devisdead.ai/news/a-reporter-with-zero-coding-experience-vibe-coded-his-own-muse-charm-for-50
- Published: 2026-11-02T12:53:50Z
- Author: DevIsDead Newsroom
- Section: Dev
- Tags: vibe coding, claude code, meta, hardware
- Originally reported by The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/1013375/muse-charm-gadgets-preview-waveshare-esp32-claude-vibe-code).

Meta wants to sell you a cute AI pendant this holiday season. A journalist built one first, without knowing how to code.

[The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/1013375/muse-charm-gadgets-preview-waveshare-esp32-claude-vibe-code)'s Sean Hollister paid $50 for a Waveshare ESP32-S3 touchscreen devkit, one of the boards Meta itself suggests for building a Muse Gadget that talks to its Muse AI cloud using Meta's open-source code.

## What actually shipped

Out of the box, it barely worked. Muse first treated his voice as audio to transcribe, replies were slow and silent, only a few words fit on screen, there was a single avatar, and it couldn't find smart home devices on its own.

Then he pointed Claude Code at it and started asking. In a few sessions he got a swipeable conversation history, spoken replies through an ElevenLabs voice, a remote shutter with a live preview for his phone camera, a Bluetooth camera preview, a pocket-watch face with working hands (about 15 minutes), a batch of avatars, and a Tamagotchi-style game with hunger, boredom and dirt levels. When he kept releasing the push-to-talk button too early, a fix to ignore clips under a second landed minutes later.

## The reality check

Hollister is upfront that he has no coding experience and can't tell whether any of this code is sound. He also kept the device on guest Wi-Fi, citing a report of Muse leaking a reviewer's home address. His conclusion is the interesting part: the reason to carry a dedicated gadget isn't Muse, which his phone already runs. It's being able to make the hardware do whatever you want. Whether Meta's actual Muse Charm will be this programmable is an open question.

For developers, it's a neat snapshot of where vibe coding is: amazing for personal hardware hacks, and a security review waiting to happen if anyone ships it.

**[Scoreboard](/scoreboard) update:** AI +1. A non-coder builds working hardware features with Claude Code.

Stay undead.