Maddie Reese says to Lenny’s newsletter that she went from zero coding experience to building a working Twitter pager, an AI-powered receipt printer, and her own personal API. In this post, she shares how Cursor and a Raspberry Pi helped her turn fun, weird ideas into real hardware.
According to Maddie’s experience :
1) You don’t need to understand code to build physical projects. Maddie compares her coding ability to knowing just enough Spanish to get by in San Diego. She can read parts of the code, spot an incorrect wire specification, and tell whether the AI is heading in the right direction. She is not writing functions from scratch. That level of literacy was still enough to ship three working hardware projects.
2) Start with the brainstorm. Before Maddie buys any components, she explains the full idea to Cursor and asks it to interview her. The back-and-forth continues until the major questions are resolved. Only then does Cursor generate a shopping list. On one project, it recommended the wrong wires. Maddie caught the mistake during her final review, avoiding both a wasted purchase and a week of troubleshooting.
3) Her hardware workflow follows a simple sequence : idea, interview, shopping list, buy, build. She has used the same process for the thermal printer, the pager, and her personal API. Each project began with a plain-language description of what she wanted. Cursor helped work out the technical requirements before she spent any money.
4) Building for fun is a perfectly valid strategy. Claire and Maddie both acknowledged that routing a tweet through four different services just to reach a pager is not especially practical. That also was not the point. AI handled the coding, so the architecture only needed to work. Letting go of the idea that every project had to be elegant or sensible made it much easier to finish.
5) A personal API becomes much more useful once agents can access it. Maddie’s API includes details like her coffee order, pet names, time zone, favorite snacks, and preferred restaurants in San Francisco. The original idea was to help friends do something thoughtful without having to ask her a string of questions. Claire pointed to a more interesting possibility : an agent could check when Maddie will next be in San Francisco and book one of her favorite restaurants automatically. That is where the concept starts to feel much bigger.
6) A clean Cursor chat works better than a full terminal setup during early ideation. Maddie keeps the terminals, browser windows, and file trees closed while she is working through the plan. She focuses on a single conversation until the architecture feels settled. The terminals come later. The stripped-down environment helps her think without getting pulled into implementation too early.
