I built an AI Tamagotchi before Meta could

Meta is pitching the Muse Charm as a cute pocket companion for its Muse AI this holiday season. The Verge's Sean Hollister skipped the wait and bought a $50 Waveshare ESP32-S3 touchscreen pendant, one of Meta's own suggested boards for building a Muse Gadget that talks directly to its cloud.

Out of the box it was close to useless: slow, silent, a few words on screen at a time, one avatar. Then he pointed Claude Code at it. A few sessions later it had a conversation history page, a spoken voice through ElevenLabs, a remote camera shutter for his phone, a working pocket watch face, and a full Tamagotchi-style pet game. He says he has no coding experience.

This is the kind of story we love, and it's also the kind we read carefully. The upside is real. A non-programmer took an open devkit and, by describing what he wanted in plain language, got features shipped in minutes. A watch face in 15 minutes. A push-to-talk bug fixed by filtering out clips under a second. That is useful AI doing exactly what it promises: shrinking the distance between an idea and a working thing.

I also give Meta some credit. Publishing open-source code and sanctioning cheap third-party hardware for its assistant is a more open posture than most companion gadgets take. It's what made this experiment possible at all.

Now the eyes-open part, which the author raises himself. He has no idea whether the code is any good, and says it might be fatally flawed. That's honest, and it's the central risk of vibe-coded hardware at scale: devices sitting on home networks, with microphones and camera links, running code nobody reviewed. He put the gadget on guest Wi-Fi and won't trust Muse with his email or home network after hearing it leaked a reviewer's home address. That instinct should be the default, not the exception.

The sharpest point is the one he lands on. A dedicated device only earns its place if it does something the phone in your pocket can't. Muse alone doesn't clear that bar. Programmability might. Whether Meta's retail Muse Charm stays this open will decide if it's a toy or a platform.

Meta showed the Muse Charm and its avatars at Meta Connect. Muse Gadgets use Meta's open-source code and tokens to connect to Muse's cloud, and the Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C is among the boards Meta suggests for building one.