Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess.

It’s a funny time to live through. A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.

OP works at a robotics company, hence the inability to use Google search and "git clone" to find dozens of ready made apps, some of them years old.

Somehow, on HN, suggesting to use an LLM to solve some problem gives you negative responses.

But then ... posting to HN that you've used an LLM to solve a problem is OK?

So GIMP kept crashing on me when importing 48 bit TIFFs. I threw a trace at Codex (without so much as a local GIMP repo) from which it figured out that the culprit was thumb preview handling code. It suggested turning off two non-obvious to me options that would circumvent that codepath it indeed worked.

I used bluez and bash to lock xscreensaver using some very minimal bash. It wasn't my idea I believe people on the Gentoo forums were doing it.

But you can just loop over something like `hcitool rssi "$MAC"` and project it somewhere, there's a variety of ways.

I like using dunstify with the -p option to persist on screen.

I think it's really impressive what these agents can do, but you should also consider whether you're asking it to burn tokens reinventing the wheel for you, or making a pretty wrapper around a wrapper.

I have a bad Ethernet cables through unused chimney from my apartament to the basement. The workers I asked to pull it just did it brute force and 2 of pairs are broken. When I was chatting with Claude to see if I can use it somehow to send Ethernet packets one of the Claude responses was to use broken cables as a pilot to pull fiber channel!

> Out of ideas, I asked Claude how I could find it. It suggested tracking the Bluetooth signal strength, then wrote me a meter in about a minute.

two sentence horror

That's because people like me were doing that and writing about it 20+ years ago. Everything from Claude comes from human minds.

I did that a few years ago when my wife lost her fitbit in the woods. She knew the approximate area, +/- 50ft. Thick brush. Using a BT meter on the phone led me right to it like a metal detector

Many apps already do that, and the LLM is trained with them (and a million others). No astounding news here.

Had this song in my head, wrote some lyrics, hummed it into Suno, generated the song. I love listening to it. What a world.

I make little tools like that all the time. My GitHub is filled with these little things I write or gen once never to be used again. Some of them I use daily (GitHub.com/dexterlagan). Since LLMs became decent I make even more of these. The more we move forward, the more people make things for their own use. I think it's cool. I see a lot of naysayers, but man, I have been waiting for this kind of tech since I was 10. Let's enjoy it I say.

Yes you can do that.

It’s a standard feature on my Garmin watch. I can access it in a few button presses, sometimes two if it’s the last action I used.

Codex helped me reverse engineer the BTLE protocol for a decibel meter. Now I can visualize the volume on the dance floor from the DJ booth.

https://github.com/nzoschke/sgtm

Claude has discovered "bluetoothctl scan on" amazing. Worth every cent.

I routinely use the RSSI indications in my UniFi WiFi (thoroughly recommended) to find various kids devices around the house. You go by AP first (each section has its own), then each room tends to give its own RSSI, give or take.

Reminded me of the tech in this https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

I use rssi to find my stuff regularly. There are a ton of android apps to do it. I also use it for room presence detection with homeassistant (using the BLE in my ESP32s and Shelly switches).

A few weeks ago, I lost my bluetooth earbuds in my house somewhere. It was still connected and nowhere to be found.

In my case, it wasn't able to come up with it, but fortunately I was, and had it build a local webpage that does "hot or cold" with a 0-100 score. And it worked first try! Found them in like 2-minutes.

Also made for a fun day of hot-and-cold hide-and-seek games with my niece after i had it built that concept as a sideloaded ipad app :)

Neat! But why not just call the phone? Was it on mute?

Not a comment about just effing calling your own number from any of the office phones.

sigh

If this happens often for you (it does for me) I can recommend a garmin watch. It also can find the phone based on signal strength. If the app garmin app is running in the background it can also play a sound on your phone, but the signal strength part saved me many times.

Bluetooth? If Claude is so smart, why didn't it suggest just calling the number? But that wouldn't have sold its astonishing ability to miss the obvious and take the scenic route.

Claude is MacGyvermaxxing

There are already apps that do this, I've used them before for this

knowing what I know about social media there's a 75% chance this story didn't even happen

i wanted to extract the text of a book on holydays. so i had no flatbed scanner arround.I downloaded the adobe scaner app. it was a desaster. then i just gave the raw images to claude and it extracted the content absolut perfect... it didnt even used to many tokens.

its funny but also concering how many apps seems to become completly pointless very fast...

Cant wait for it to find my car keys

While I don't think this is novel I am a believer that AI has changed computing forever in the same way the tweet implies.

I now use my own video compositor to edit videos instead of after effects https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/

use my own ecommerce and landing page builder for my businesses. that I use in production.

https://modelpad.app/

Cancelled by Strength App, Zwift for indoor bike trainer, and strava for running apps and built my own app that brings all 3 together and works better. https://coachsamsyn.com/

Among about 100 little smaller tools.

All of these are released and work. Some of them have other customers. One of them has 1000s.

There is absolutely no way I could have done all of this without AI. I don't really consider most of it too be slop, ive been an engineer for 20 years. I care a lot about the details and the underlying properties of the system. I had shipped my side projects years before AI that had real users so I have a good idea of what it takes to ship something end to end that people can actually use. It's mostly about the details and ease of use and the last 20% is the hardest. Some of us know that from our day jobs but it is different when you have to it all yourself and be responsible for every choice.

Started my career in wireless comms back in the day.

And I remember wanting something like this, thinking "this is so dumb, the sensor is here, I just need the code to extract the signal".

Well now you can just prompt for it.

cool, that’s like the Phone Buddy app for Apple Watch

"Come on Rebecca, you did not lose your phone"

2026, Year of Linux on the desktop, thanks to AI!

At some point I realize how far I have come as an engineer. I find this solution to be the worst answer. The right answer is to look at the WiFi signal. No coding required.

Good lord, the damage LLM use has done to deep thinking is amazing for such a short time. Maybe if it stayed hard to find your phone, you would have put some time into considering the root cause of the problem: you put an employer MDM on your phone. Except, well. Now it's their phone. You just pay for it.