Watch now | 🎙️ Maddie Reese built a thermal printer anyone can message, a working Twitter pager, and a personal API using Cursor, a Raspberry Pi, and the radical idea that fun beats practical ✦ AI generated
Maddie's signature project: a globally-messageable thermal printer she built with a Raspberry Pi, demonstrated live in the episode.
Episode description / show notes (Maddie Reese featured): How Maddie built a thermal receipt printer that accepts messages from anywhere in the world using a Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth
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One of Maddie's hardware projects: a pager that receives Twitter notifications, built with a Raspberry Pi.
Episode description / show notes (Maddie Reese featured): The pager project
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Maddie describes her workflow: dumping ideas into Cursor's agent view, letting it interview her for requirements, and getting a shopping list — all without touching a terminal.
Episode description / show notes (Maddie Reese featured): Why she uses Cursor's clean agent view instead of terminals and browsers
Maddie built a personal API that surfaces things like her coffee order, pets, and favorite snacks, designed for both human and AI agent consumption.
Episode description / show notes (Maddie Reese featured): What belongs in a personal API and why agents, not just humans, will be the ones using it
Maddie's philosophy is that prioritizing enjoyment over utility leads to more completed hardware projects.
Episode description / show notes (Maddie Reese featured): Why building for fun, not practicality, is the fastest path to actually shipping physical projects
Maddie advocates for a pragmatic, just-enough approach to learning code — enough to build things, not necessarily to master everything.
Episode description / show notes (Maddie Reese featured): How to read just enough code to do some damage, without needing to understand all of it