So, surely you’re asking yourself: what is this?

Well. For my daughter’s birthday she got a CyberPi, a pocket-sized programmable gadget with a little color screen. Lovely thing, but the out-of-the-box menus and examples aren’t exactly built for a kid, so I set out to make it more accessible, with friendlier menus and a handful of ready-to-run example commands. And I brought Claude along to help with the code.

That’s where I hit a wall. Claude could write the code just fine. What it couldn’t do was see. Every time I asked whether something had actually worked, whether the screen showed what we intended, it was flying blind. Regardless of how many attempts we made, it simply could not figure out what was actually displaying on the CyberPi. It’s a physical device sitting on my desk, and Claude lives in the terminal. No eyes.

The answer turned out to be almost too simple. I grabbed an older laptop, half-folded it so the lid’s webcam pointed straight at the CyberPi, and that was it. Now Claude takes the occasional screenshot through that webcam to check its own work. Did the text render? Did the menu change? Snap a frame and look. A spare-laptop hack that closed the whole loop.

What you’re seeing up top is “Hello”, glowing on the screen after so many attempts to win against the stubborn main menu that wouldn’t go away. Here’s the adversary itself:

It doesn’t look like much. But getting past it, reliably, from code, and knowing we’d gotten past it, took more rounds than I’d like to admit. The webcam is what finally made those rounds count, because for the first time Claude could tell the difference between “it worked” and “it thinks it worked”.

There’s a small lesson buried in here. We spend a lot of energy giving AI better instructions, better prompts, better tools. Often the simpler move wins: shorten the feedback loop and you hit gold. Give it a way to see the results of its own actions in the real world, which is exactly what a half-folded laptop and a cheap webcam did.

I’m aware of the irony here: I want the kid to learn code the honest way, while I lean on an AI to skip half the steps myself. But I made my peace with it. I earned those programming chops the long way years ago, I just don’t get to tinker the way I used to, certainly not on a weeknight in the middle of a workweek. Claude shortens the path enough that a project like this actually happens instead of living forever on the someday list.

And she got her friendlier menus.