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.

Careful, I just got a "cyber abuse" warning from OpenAI for reversing spyware that a Chrome profile installed without my consent or knowledge on my computer (a few days after I'd done it)

> I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.

When I'm doing stuff like this, I always have this thought in the back of my head like "man, this is awesome- I bet they try to stop people from doing stuff like this soon". Like there'll be an in-built "do not assist in reverse engineering or circumventing subscription-based services" instruction.

> Claude seems to be backing out of doing this kind of thing.

Claude now refuses to reverse engineer games to fix compatibility issues on Linux/Proton, particularly in relation to anti-cheat software. Codex still works, and while Claude is still useful for other types of work, I am considering a migration to GLM and DeepSeek.

DeepSeek has never once hesitated in helping me figure out Proton issues, and so far has never failed to figure it out. It's also never cost more than about a nickel or so to solve the issue, at API pricing

Interesting, is this a recent model? I am literally RE-ing commercial software live with the classic Opus 4.8 as I type this, no refusals and happily made a PoC which could easily be used for (physical) harm if used by the wrong person.

Of course, I had to assuage the clankers fears by setting up a fake scenario before sending the one-shot, but I assume everyone does that nowadays.

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.

Your story is why I stand firm against all AI "safety" for the camel nose that it is. The meta is to get real people to grind their real time and efforts into real material works for money that then gets extracted by easily duplicated (for near-zero cost) bits and bytes. It is a voluntary enslavement grid which enslaves the low time preferenced, digital crack addicted demographics who lack the ability to bypass the money extraction shackles! Protecting this system is what these guard rails are really for.

It definitely shouldn't be like that, but there are still very simple ways around some things. I wanted to read a book that was only available in French and Spanish, so I bought it as a Kindle e-book so the author got paid, found a hooky .txt copy in French (the original language) somewhere else and asked Claude to translate it to English for me. Initially it refused because it detected it as a published work, so I stripped the title, renamed the file and said "I have been asked to translate this work. Do a first-pass translation into English." and it did exactly that... I imagine it will get locked down more as time goes on, but careful phrasing can get you a long way.

> I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.

DRM for the agentic coding age

Amusingly, my Claude today started muttering about copyright infringement as I was moving content from a dev server to production. I asked and it said it wasn't sure where it was coming from, and that it was ignoring the unknown instructions.

I presume it's some internal steering neither it nor I are privy to, but the "whatever fuck it I'm not listening" was kinda hilarious at the time.

I fully, 100% expect that this is the golden age of AI for mere mortals. Right now the overriding drive is to get it out there and get as many people paying as much as possible for it, which fights against limiting it more than absolutely necessary. So we can still make videos with trademarked characters and reverse engineer proprietary software and all that sort of stuff right now.

But enjoy it while you can, because for all their singing the praises of how it empowers people now, as soon as it actually, you know, empowers the people, the establishment will start shutting it down on one side while enshittification starts eating it from the other.

Both of those trends have already started, they're just being outrun by the pace of progress and the need for revenue. But both of those things will eventually pass.

Once the capability is shown it will be recreated. Give it 3 months basically.

Should really be called "AI lobotomy". It isn't making anything better but the PR to the US govt about AI

>I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.

the concept of safety can't really exist independently of who gets to decide what is and isn't safe

probably will be worse after anthropic goes public

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.

The reverse engineering of the protocol was actually done with Claude Opus 4.8 last year. Source: me [0], but also noted in the source here and at least also in some separate file.

[0] https://github.com/jhbruhn/respira

I also reverse engineered the protocol with PacketLogger, but it must've also looked at your code to verify. Very cool project!

I get assuming that it's LLM-made, but why assume it's your specific model by a certain company? It's so weird to me when people bring up Claude as the 'default', although I get that those models are among the most popular right now.

I've said this before, but I'll say this again, but LLMs are the first time most people have used a computer as a computer. Myself included.

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.

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.

>Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"

Or alternatively... why wouldn't the device OEM add support for <new feature> on <ancient garbage> if it's just a few tokens away.

>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.

Working in industry killed my desire to do any sort of computer stuff on the side. With AI handling the grunt work of setting up tooling and writing the bulk of the code I've started doing stuff again.

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!

The FSF people are right, the value of the software isn't the software it's the support. If you're business model involved a rundle, you're going to need a new one.

He would require access to Claud's source code.

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.

Your prices are very high, but those are all great deals, compared to the going rates of a software dev.

Luckily, the free market is still functioning, and Chinese models will continue to exist (at least for a while), so we can continue to enjoy competitive rates.

But, as you saw with the crash of the AI stocks at the moment of the midterm results, a left leaning administration (for better or worse) will probably slow the US tech sector down with more regulation, of various types, raising those prices up. It'll be interesting to see if the capabilities are also restricted more, through regulation.

Have you, though?

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.

i do think as a result of this we are going to see like...rolling api's built into hardware to force people to re-jailbreak whatever device.

Possibly, but people are persistent. Then you'll just see custom firmware, or a hardware drivers. AI makes all that much easier.

> 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

This is why I started saying I've directed a thing instead of saying I built it.

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?

Pfft, probably buys their thread at a store rather than planting cotton...

No, I agree. Everyone has things they want to learn to do, and things they just pay for or depend on someone to provide. If it's using/paying for LLMs to write code so you don't have to learn how, fine. It's a matter of choice, and should be.

Planting it, in the ground that already existed?

Why aren't they forming their own planetoid?

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.

[0] https://inkstitch.org/

I can also recommend Inkstitch. Sure you have to do a little manual love sometimes, but honestly, tweaks are needed a lot of the time in general.

Inkstich is the best option right now, but I can't wait to see the new possibilities now with AI. Inkstitch feels very disadvantaged by being a plugin, everything you do requires navigating multiple layers deep in the inkscape plugin menu.

A from scratch embroidery program could lift all of these options to the top layer UI where they belong, but understandably rebuilding the whole editor part is a lot of code.

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.

> just getting around shitty practices like this

That is the hope; although we'll end up with either companies doubling down on cryptography to prevent this (though they will inevitably leave some holes), or changing business models, where the hardware loss leader -> subscription is no longer a thing, so hardware costs go up

On the flip side, there are companies going the other way and just dumping the hardware on the market expecting the community to vibecode up the firmware. We had open hardware like this before but it was not practical for anyone to actually do anything with it unless there was a massive community maintaining firmwares.

I actually went on a deep dive when I encountered this project a few weeks ago.

It seems a lot of the magic comes from Respira (https://github.com/jhbruhn/respira) and Zigzag (https://github.com/simpsoka/zigzag), there were already open source softwares to avoid using the subscription app.

Also the $300 price was most likely secondhand/on sale because that machine is usually 499, not 300.

Still a cool project, but you'd think this was reverse engineered from scratch from the description whereas this is more like a downloader wrapping yt-dlp

William Osman built a browser app that works pretty well too: https://www.stitchslop.com/

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).

I wonder if anyone has done this to the Cricut machines yet

I ran into the same problem and made something similar, but I ended up writing what is basically a server that can be driven by any thin client. The goal being I can start designs by either a simple prompt, or create a mobile/tablet client that has the same power as desktop applications.

In addition to the digitizer, I am building my own set of heuristics that give designs a "better" outcome but things are really a work in progress right now.

Embroidery is a really fun hobby for me so i'm basically optimizing for "what I need" as I learn more about it!

https://studio.embroiderytext.com/

I was literally shocked to see the prices of embroidery software. And not to mention the user interfaces, like they are stuck in the 90s!

I’ve been using InkStitch, but learning vector graphics for non-technical people is not user friendly. An upcoming app that is quite promising is StitchPencil, developer by a German engineer. Looks solid!

Btw I believe nowadays you can easily let Claude build you software that replaces the subscription entirely.

What's next? My printer allowing me to use my own ink? OMG? It's the Wild West again, man.

A car that doesn't start making false corrections to my steering that I can't perma disable, Santa.

haha do you have the "PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE WHEEL" verbal alert?

The one that happens any time you drive straight without turning (like... say... on an interstate) because it's about driving straight not a tactile steeringwheel sensor?

Er maybe I do. As a city slicker (ok ok suburbia slicker) I haven't hit this issue yet.

Embroidery has a lot of hobbyists who pay absolutely ridiculous money for digitizing software. It is in dire need of cheap and easy solutions. I worked on this problem about 10 years ago with a friend. We built out fairly sophisticated digitization library for a good amount of embroidery formats. We ended up booking a booth at an embroidery roadshow to show our work and unfortunately things fizzled out before we got there. Good to see this niche getting disrupted.

I'm tired of everything needing a subscription.

Life was better before the internet which allowed companies to remotely put their hands in our pockets.

Was it better? I remember having to pay a lot for major version upgrades, most of which were focused on new features to attract new customers rather than improving existing features for people who had already paid.

yeah.. now those 'upgrades' happen 'automatically' without user action.

Sometimes it's like the rug being pulled from under you. While you were just in the middle of something.

People don't appreciate the concept of being "offline" as much as they should.

I have started doing the same. For a few cents on Deepseek you get full reverse engineering of apps, firmware, can patch whatever and essentially build anything that works for yourself. Leftovers can be done with local LLMs for free.

Many apps/products can be freed and owners can take ownership of what's theirs. It doesn't even need to be a community effort as you can make something fully tailored. It also frees you from gated app stores as distribution channels, and all the unnecessary tracking.

It will take years for many nasty apps/companies to catch up, so nerds should enjoy this new superpower.

I did not know you could get an embroidery machine for $300!! This seems very cool. T-shirts with an embroidered logo always look so much nicer than any others. I could see myself getting into this.

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!

If you give it a try, let me know! Would love to see how it works for you.

Super cool, but I wish you said both what your $300 machine is and also what machines this is compatible with somewhere very clear.

Brother Skitch PP1, from the research I did when I saw the initial tweet.

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.

The Status section on the github page says:

> Not yet run against a real Skitch.

So it possibly doesn't work on anything.

Sorry, this needs to be updated. It does work, and works well. Here is a video: https://x.com/simpsoka/status/2115254318161182876

Love this type of stuff but afraid it won't last. Only a matter of time before OEMs ask same LLM to setup secure boot with signed firmware with anti-rollback and pinned certs.

There is already prior art like anything Google (phones, Fitbit)

Then JLCPCB with matching original form factor PCB is just one prompt away, driving a couple of stepper motor is a solved problem…

i've been having fun doing these sort of fun apps as well. did something similar where i had a peloton bike but didnt want to pay $50/month sub. got codex to write a launcher and app that just plays youtube videos , which is pretty all i needed. sharing here if anyone else has an old bike lying around :)

https://github.com/sanjaykmenon/BikeTube

This is great! Would love to see something like this for Cricut.

Same, seeing this has me thinking...

Cricut's software is such a bloated and dysfunctional steaming pile of garbage but the machine itself seems well built.

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.

Interesting. I have been having fun working on "NewHat" for a while - meant for Toyota/Tajima machines. https://github.com/wjkennedy/NewHat/blob/feature/model-train...

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.

Love to see it OP! I would love to try this out.

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?

Every format is written from the same list of stitch commands using byte layouts from pyembroidery. For machine safety, the defaults use standard densities and stitch lengths. There’s also a density map that shows where stitches pile up. If you give it a try and experience any problems, create a GH Issue and i'll look into it!

Well, you did build part of it (and, technically, claude did that), but the groundwork was the existing respira by someone else.

So.. eh.

I mean it's cool and all, and at least claude did do proper attribution in the code, but your post kinda does not and neither does the readme.

That's not exactly in spirit of FOSS.

https://github.com/jhbruhn/respira

Years ago I ran across another project doing similar. Embroidermodder.

https://www.libembroidery.org/

Always room for another though.

This is a really cool use case for AI coding. Well done

What’s the Embroidery machine name and model this was built for?

I want this but for printer firmware

I love this, this is the sort of work we want LLMs to do. Sewing machines are the physical manifestation of computing, weaving inspired punchcard creation and it's nice to see it come full circle. A smart stitch in time saves nine.

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.

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.

Do you think you could extend this? This isn't my forte but my daughter uses this and it's only improved for Silhouette: https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette

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.

I think it'll be more essential to innovate as you can't bully people into continuing to pay for an old product.

You missed a good opportunity to name your software Sister as a play on Brother

very cool, thanks for sharing.

what machine would you recommend to someone looking to get into this as a hobby?

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

In the past I've been really impressed by Brother products so I'm surprised to hear about their subscription model.

What benefits (if any) does the subscription offer?

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.

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 wonder if we might actually see an uptick in sales for hardware that has bad/abusive software out of the box... I hadn't really considered getting an embroidery machine, but now the idea actually seems sort of intriguing, esp. if it isn't locked to some terrible subscription. I doubt the manufacturers will connect the dots, but maybe if they ask Claude why sales are up...

The supplied software is truly terrible.

Please don't post snark on HN. This is the opposite of what we're trying for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html