“There’s no blocker for your creativity anymore,” says Vermeeren, who is now also investing in Schematik. “That’s why I’m so excited about it and building stuff constantly.”
He’s not the only one. On Thursday, Anthropic engineer Felix Rieseberg posted on X to announce that Anthropic has now enabled “a little Bluetooth API for makers and developers, allowing you to build hardware devices that interact with Claude.” He also shared a picture and a GitHub link for a device that looks very similar to Vermeeren’s Clawy, though Rieseberg and Anthropic did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment about whether it was directly inspired by Beek’s or Vermeeren’s work.
“If I inspired someone with it, I’m proud,” Vermeeren says. “If Anthropic built an official feature because of it, I’m even prouder.”
Just about every AI tech company seems to be making some kind of hardware device, whether it’s a giant like OpenAI, the big chipmakers, or more niche wearables. Beyond that, there have always been crowds of tinkerers and makers looking to build tech, whether it’s to turn vapes into synthesizers or push back against ICE.
“The big problem in hardware is that it’s very gatekept and that very few people can do it,” Beek says. “I really hope that my tool can help enable more people to build, either with the tool or to learn how to build hardware through the tool.”
Vibe coding in software has its own sort of bad rap, given that it can lead to big vulnerabilities in software. It’s possible that vibe coding hardware gets to that point too, or devolves into a slog of infinite hardware-slop.
“With languages or images, LLMs are much more subjective about what’s right or wrong,” Beek says. “The nice thing about electronics is that it’s pure physics, so you can actually check.”