It may come as a shock to you, dear reader, that I have quite a lot of gadgets. Gadgets are often a bit wonky. This is just a blog post about how much has changed these days, because I just find it kinda… OK, “mind-blowing” might not be the right word, but it’s a pretty big shift.
In the olden days (i.e., before spring 2026), when a gadget was slightly wonky, you either lived with it, spent hours and hours and hours to get it to work, or you ditched it.
Much wonkiness is of the kind that it’s just occasionally annoying, so you just live with it for years… but that’s over now. It’s happened many times over the last month, confronted with some wonkiness, and I’ve gone “right, that’s a bit wonky… let’s fix it with Claude!”
As an example — take this nice Turn Touch remote that I’ve used for more than a decade to control the stereo. It’s always been slightly wonky, and I’ve just lived with it.
The wonkiness consists of it losing touch with the script on the server that executes commands based on the buttons I press. This happens, like, once every three days: I press a button and nothing happens. I grumble, and wait half a minute, and then I press the button again and it works.
This time around, instead of grumbling, I just asked Claude what to do. It said to switch Bluetooth logging on for a few hours, which I did and then pasted it into Claude, and it said that the Bluetooth disconnection defaults were way too aggressive for this type of device, and told me how to fix those… and now the connection is 100% rock solid.
Could I have found this out myself by dedicating myself to learning how Bluetooth works? Sure. But would I? Well, I have a decade of history that shows that I didn’t.
Amusingly enough, having the connection be solid meant that a different annoyance became more problematic: Sometimes when I hit a button, nothing happens. Then I hit another button, and then the previous thing happens. Every time I hit a button (e.g., “pause”) it would do the previous thing (e.g., “skip to next track”). But then it would fix itself… because it dropped connection and restarted, and that flushed the queue.
But that doesn’t happen any more, so the remote would be in permanent “previous command” mode.
So I asked Claude again, and it downloaded the Python libraries I used, and said that there’s a bug in the main loop: If I hit buttons rapidly, the remote may send several button presses in one event. The event loop only reads one button press per event. The fix is to keep reading button presses until the queue is empty, which was a one-line fix.
Again, was this something I could have fixed myself? Sure. Would I? Again, no.
Look, I’ve been an LLM hater from the start. I still think LLMs are to be considered toys, because they just can’t be relied on. And people who use them to generate text and images should be sent to re-education camps until they’re sorry for what they’ve done.
But for this sort of computery fiddling, we’re in a new era: Whenever we see something annoying, we can probably get an LLM to fix it for us in fifteen minutes.
(It depends on the LLM, of course — for giggles, I tried using Opus 5.5 to solve the first Turn Touch problem, and it totally led me down a useless garden path. Fable 5.1 fixed it in one go.)
This feels pretty futuristic, finally — I have a problem; the smart computer fixes it itself, and I get stupider and stupider. That’s the future as predicted, right?
