I Built an AI Tamagotchi Before Meta Could

The Verge profiles a developer who built a functional AI-powered Tamagotchi-style companion device using a Waveshare ESP32 board and Claude as the underlying model, vibe-coded into existence before any major tech company shipped a comparable consumer product. The project demonstrates how accessible AI-augmented hardware prototyping has become — combining commodity microcontrollers, an API call to a frontier model, and rapid iteration to produce a genuinely novel consumer gadget. For developers interested in physical AI products, this is a useful case study in the current state of AI-hardware integration at the hobbyist and indie level. It also implicitly benchmarks what a solo developer can ship today against what large companies have yet to productize, which is a meaningful signal about the pace of the field. The use of Claude for personality and response generation highlights how frontier model APIs are becoming the default intelligence layer even in low-cost embedded projects.