I'm going to assume Claude did the heavy lifting here (because it's Q4 2026 and the odds are in my favor), so if I'm right: this is one of the best examples of the way LLMs can empower users to not only scratch all the itches, but demonstrate to anyone who stumbles by just how satisfying it can be to do so themselves.
Your app represents a future that I, an old, actually love. When I see projects like this, I don't think about ongoing support or if the project will be abandoned. I think, "Woah, I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm going to try it. Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"
Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.
And if you wrote it by hand, my hat's off to you for sharing that, too.
Claude seems to be backing out of doing this kind of thing. It didn't want to create a fake server so I could flash my camera. I argued with it about how where I live I have the legal right to do this. It agreed but still wouldn't do it.
Codex did it and flashed it in 1 minute.
I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.
The more people do stuff like this, the better. Subscription based e-waste is awful.
Now think about a future where even asking gets you a refusal and silently put on a list. A future lawsuit could even force them to submit historical chats as evidence for projects that people have written or are writing now that they think they are getting away with because the llm isn’t currently refusing.
Right and at first people won't mind, but eventually they will not be able to help themselves enshittifying. Which is why I'm big on open weight models. I hope in 2031 there's a giant Mac mini sitting in my office running one.
ChatGPT, but close! You're right, I likely wouldn't have approached the project if I had to write it all by hand. But it was fairly easy with AI, and I was impressed with the results. The days of personalized software are here. I built it exactly to my spec - similar to Adobe suite, and with built in MCP support.
I've been saying that computers are just now getting out of their beta period. I hope that we continue to recognize that any computer you can't freely program is not really yours.
Imagine if RMS had access to Claude and wasn't activated by the need to modify printer software himself. We might not have the FSF, GNU, GPL, or anything downstream from those!
If he were in this thread, I think he'd warn us to avoid nonfree LLMs and not to let LLMs lull us into being comfortable while we still lack software freedom.
So how much would you pay to be able to do that? $30, 40, 100? Once they IPO, they'll find out exactly how much they can sell the same things back to you for.
It's cool, and it's nice to see people rebelling against the "hardware I bought held hostage to a subscription" business model, but if you use an AI to do this and don't understand what it's done, you've just traded one subscription dependency for another.
Will this stop operating if you unsubscribe from claude?
Will add-on work from chatgpt or Kimi or Qwen require starting from scratch?
Obviously, the answer is 'no'. So regardless of the "do you understand the code" purity test, this is still a net good, both for this customer, and others who can make use of this work.
I know people get a bit salty about outsiders coming in and showing stuff they 'built', and it does feel a bit like they shouldn't get the praise for something they basically spent a few evenings prompting into existence, but I think the better way of looking at is this: They had a need, they solved it, they shared it. Hopefully this helps other people as well.
I can understand the feeling of 'this isn't fair' if you're a lone third party developer who spent months of work developing an alternative that you sell for $30 a seat to a market of maybe 10000 people. Still, though. Plenty of occupations have gone through the same thing. Seamstress, farrier, lamp lighter, travel agent. I don't think the solution is trying to make occupations into gate-kept guilds.
In some sense yes. If the company invariably finds people are bypassing their subscriptions and shifts to a newer lock-in, you need to go and break it again. Sure you can argue that the usability of the fix will save more than what it costs in subscription or the fixes will work longer etc. But in a way there is a dependency.
That said,
> I know people get a bit salty about outsiders coming in and showing stuff they 'built', and it does feel a bit like they shouldn't get the praise for something they basically spent a few evenings prompting into existence
Let's not jump to conclusion about someone's motivation.
What are you talking about. This software is like the old paid-once Photoshop. Once you have it, _it's yours_. I find that so incredibly liberating, I'm finally making software that I own at the end.
Yeah I get that. I suppose it's just another variant of "I bought a $300 embroidery machine rather than actually learning how to embroider" so in that sense, why not?
If there's one thing I'm very optimistic about with AI, it's the de-bricking of bricked things, giving new life to legacy/unsupported software and hardware, or just getting around shitty practices like this.
Seems very promising. I have a home recording studio, and there's a small revolution going on with people cloning subscription-based stuff. Some brands are notorious for making expensive equipment which they just stop supporting after 10 years, sometimes rendering them obsolete. Or tacking ridiculous licensing mechanism onto the equipment.
For anyone interested in this space, I'd also recommend looking at InkStitch[0], which is a plugin for InkScape. It allows you to take SVGs and export them into file types that an embroidery machine can use. It's not without its faults (there is a surprising amount of care needed for any design - stitch placement, size, type, layering, etc), but it's been a fun experience to take an SVG and turn it into something real.
I'm curious, how do you make sure that the embroidery files are valid of the file type (.exp) for example, and that B) things aren't done in such a way that cause the needle to break, stiches to overlap too much, etc etc that would otherwise harm a machine that reads the file?
I'll have to give this a try. Back when I was trying to do embroidery with my $300 machine, I found that Hatch was the only software that would consistently give me good results. The only problem was that Hatch (at the time) was over $1,000 USD. I am a hobbyist, I refuse to pay that much for a hobby I hardly engage with. The saving grace there was that Hatch had a 30 day free trial, which I could continue to renew with a different email.
About a year into doing this, they patched it so the license server would save your HWID and would not run in a VM anymore. I decided to just give up on the hobby right there.
Maybe this will finally get me to pull the machine out of the garage and get back into it!
The readme does not specify which brand(s) or machine(s) are supported? It only mentions BT for communication? Is there then a kind of standard protoc?
It works with most machines and exports to a variety of formats. Most embroidery machines you connect a usb drive to. The specific machine I used, the Brother PP1, allows you to connect over bluetooth.
Interesting, Youtuber William Osman is also working on something similar, but for full size industrial machines. I'm not sure if its public released yet though.
Also don't forget Linus him self wrote one of the embroidery machine drivers for Linux.
I used to use the Melco and Pantagrams digitizing software and operated kiosks doing custom embroidery.
People always asked "can I get anything on a hat?" The reasons I said no before no longer exist.
Punching out a DST is not the same as clean sewouts and NewHat attempts some machine emulation and classification of generated designs. They're virtually sewn and ranked for some reinforcement learning.
We're going to see more of this. Like the guy that made the custom Mac print driver. Most companies put zero effort into making sure things like this aren't homebrew hackable.
I went with the Brother Skitch PP1. It's right around $300 on amazon. It has sub-par reviews, but I realized that most of those were because of the poorly built software and subscription fee. So far, it has worked really well for me! Edit: here is a video/image of a patch I made: https://x.com/simpsoka/status/2115254318161182876
It's maybe different business units. I have a couple industrial label printers from Brother, and although some of the software decisions are weird, there's no subscriptions or stuff like that.
I think they didn't intend for the bluetooth protocol to be reverse engineered. The free version of the software you really can't do much (limited colors, tools). I believe they also have some clip-art that they make available with the subscription. It's pretty bad.
We should kill subscription models with LLMs app by app (and possibly server by server) until hardware is sold as standalone hardware with no strings attached. I don't care if this slows down r&d or makes printers more expensive. Hardware vendors have abused the subscription model to a point that they can't be trusted with it.
I'd love a replacement for Cricut's software. You don't need a subscription for it but a few features are locked behind a subscription, and they nag a lot, and it's just so bad.
I think they initially sold this machine at a loss because of the subscription, and now they sell it even lower because people really don't want their hardware locked into a subscription.
Yep, I'm really happy when this kind of model dies. Even if it means that it's more difficult to innovate, or to launch something new. We will survive.
Your app represents a future that I, an old, actually love. When I see projects like this, I don't think about ongoing support or if the project will be abandoned. I think, "Woah, I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm going to try it. Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"
Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.
And if you wrote it by hand, my hat's off to you for sharing that, too.
Codex did it and flashed it in 1 minute.
I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.
The more people do stuff like this, the better. Subscription based e-waste is awful.
DRM for the agentic coding age
LLMs are realizing the potential of the computer revolution.
Those heady dreams of Xanadu, Xerox PARC, Douglas Engelbart, and Bret Victor today? They're finally possible.
Will this stop operating if you unsubscribe from claude?
Will add-on work from chatgpt or Kimi or Qwen require starting from scratch?
Obviously, the answer is 'no'. So regardless of the "do you understand the code" purity test, this is still a net good, both for this customer, and others who can make use of this work.
I know people get a bit salty about outsiders coming in and showing stuff they 'built', and it does feel a bit like they shouldn't get the praise for something they basically spent a few evenings prompting into existence, but I think the better way of looking at is this: They had a need, they solved it, they shared it. Hopefully this helps other people as well.
I can understand the feeling of 'this isn't fair' if you're a lone third party developer who spent months of work developing an alternative that you sell for $30 a seat to a market of maybe 10000 people. Still, though. Plenty of occupations have gone through the same thing. Seamstress, farrier, lamp lighter, travel agent. I don't think the solution is trying to make occupations into gate-kept guilds.
That said, > I know people get a bit salty about outsiders coming in and showing stuff they 'built', and it does feel a bit like they shouldn't get the praise for something they basically spent a few evenings prompting into existence
Let's not jump to conclusion about someone's motivation.
This is why I started saying I've directed a thing instead of saying I built it.
Seems very promising. I have a home recording studio, and there's a small revolution going on with people cloning subscription-based stuff. Some brands are notorious for making expensive equipment which they just stop supporting after 10 years, sometimes rendering them obsolete. Or tacking ridiculous licensing mechanism onto the equipment.
[0] https://inkstitch.org/
I think that one was built with Claude (he wanted to embroider cats on merch, and didn't like the expensive subscription software's ancient UX).
Life was better before the internet existed and allowed companies to remotely put their hands in our pockets.
I'm curious, how do you make sure that the embroidery files are valid of the file type (.exp) for example, and that B) things aren't done in such a way that cause the needle to break, stiches to overlap too much, etc etc that would otherwise harm a machine that reads the file?
About a year into doing this, they patched it so the license server would save your HWID and would not run in a VM anymore. I decided to just give up on the hobby right there.
Maybe this will finally get me to pull the machine out of the garage and get back into it!
> Not yet run against a real Skitch.
So it possibly doesn't work on anything.
Also don't forget Linus him self wrote one of the embroidery machine drivers for Linux.
I used to use the Melco and Pantagrams digitizing software and operated kiosks doing custom embroidery.
People always asked "can I get anything on a hat?" The reasons I said no before no longer exist.
Punching out a DST is not the same as clean sewouts and NewHat attempts some machine emulation and classification of generated designs. They're virtually sewn and ranked for some reinforcement learning.
Cricut's software is such a bloated and dysfunctional steaming pile of garbage but the machine itself seems well built.
https://www.libembroidery.org/
Always room for another though.
what machine would you recommend to someone looking to get into this as a hobby?
What benefits (if any) does the subscription offer?