My old friend and colleague Matt Webb has started a company this year called “Inanimate” with another old colleague (Daniel Fogg) – it’s doing lots of interesting things with ai, physical place and things, and multiplayer-ness.

Topics that have long been catnip for him.

And me!

As they’re building out their company they’re bootstrapping the tools to explore this territory – again a very MW move.

The first tool they’ve released – “Resident” allows quick and painless prototyping in HW using ai coding tools like Claude Code.

I decided to have a play with it on the hottest weekend of the year so far, and despite almost melting – it was a delightful experience. I started playing with getting an arduino nano and some rgb LED strip to talk to Claude Code.

Took me all of 20min to get some basic blinkenlights, but then the fun really began.

I quickly set about making something that could light paint emojis.

Although – as my LED rig is static with no motion sensing, I have to move my phone with a long exposure to “paint” the image.

So it’s a bit wobbly and unpredictable but so fun!

It’s the opposite of what we did back at BERG with “Making future magic” and the spinoff app “Penki” but it took minutes of my time instead of weeks from geniuses like Nick Ludlum and Campbell Orme!

Iterating rapidly in code through conversation is an everyday mundane miracle now – but having the output in the physical world almost instantly blew my tiny mind.

Can’t wait to see what’s next from Inanimate.