In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness.
It's ironic, then, that I used Claude to vibe code my Tufty GPS Time Badge.



Partly due to time constraints, and partly because I wanted to see if I could complete a personal project end-to-end, without editing a line of code, I throw my requirements at Claude and ultimately came up with this 2141 MicroPython app for Pimoroni's Badgeware ecosystem.

Jeff Geerling is a software developer, author, and open-source contributor known for his expertise in infrastructure automation and Drupal development. Readers can learn about DevOps practices, Ansible automation, and web development with Drupal. With blog posts, tutorials, and open-source projects, Jeff Geerling shares  insights and best practices for building and managing web infrastructure.

Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling recounts attending Open Sauce, a maker/hardware convention, and building a GPS Time Badge using Pimoroni's Tufty 2350 and an Adafruit PA1010D GPS module. The badge disciplines its internal RTC with GPS time data, achieving millisecond-level accuracy despite lacking a PPS pin. Notably, the entire 2141-line MicroPython app was vibe-coded using Claude without manually editing a single line of code. Geerling also used Claude to generate an interactive data visualization of GPS satellite fix quality logged throughout the event venue. He reflects on the irony of using AI to build a project while attending an event that felt like a refreshing escape from AI-dominated online culture.

Open Sauce and GPS time were my summer AI Antiseptics