I've been coding since I was 11, but playing guitar and writing and singing and recording songs for about a decade now. And somewhere in my musical journey, I realized something:
The red “Record” button changes you.
It tightens your shoulders.
It turns exploration into performance.
It makes you think instead of play.
So you leave it to not recording by default - then when inspiration strikes, and you think "Record that!” — oops it’s gone already. So I built myself an audio engineer agent to always be listening. I did it solely by chatting with OpenClaw via Telegram, on a Raspberry pi 5. He was up and running in under 30 minutes - using code techniques I didn't even know at the beginning! And if you were curious - I named him "Rick" - because he's always rolling...
The Idea: A Ring Buffer As The Engineer
The idea is simply this: An always-on ring buffer.
A rolling 10–15 minutes of audio. Continuously recording. Continuously overwriting itself.
Like an engineer in the room who’s always listening, but never judging.
If something magical happens?
You tell it "Rick send me the last 5 minutes you recorded"
And you get the file in under a minute as a telegram message.
No prep.
No red light.
No performance mode.
Just: Oh yeah - that's what I was going for.
How I Built it (OpenClaw Vibe Coding)
This is where it gets wild.
I didn’t open a whiteboard.
I didn’t spec it.
I didn’t design a formal architecture.
I opened OpenClaw and vibe-coded it by chatting with it and testing it out.
“Give me a low-latency circular audio buffer.”
“Now add a command to flush the last N minutes to disk and send that file via Telegram”
Each prompt fit in a text message. Each step took minutes. No doc-diving through audio libraries for two hours. Just momentum.
By 10 pm I had:
- Live mic input
- A rolling buffer
- A save-last-5-minutes command
- Zero disk clutter
- Zero pressure
By 11 I was adding clip detection, file renaming, and purging as features. And of course I stayed up past that!
This Is the Era of the Single-Person Toolmaker
This would have been a weekend project a few years ago.
Or something I’d half-start and abandon.
Instead?
One evening.
Some prompts.
Tight feedback loops.
Working software.
And here’s what’s exciting:
I didn’t build a whole product.
I built a tiny tool I've dreamed about for years - that permanently upgrades how I create.
No Deployment. No Users. Just Me.
This never needs to ship.
It doesn’t need auth.
It doesn’t need analytics.
It doesn’t need a landing page.
It exists entirely in my studio.
If I want to share it with someone - I can send them the prompts I used and they can build it for themselves!
The Bigger Shift
As a software engineering manager, I spend a lot of time thinking about leverage. This was personal leverage.
The same force that’s reshaping design systems, agent-first dev, and code generation pipelines - can also reshape your personal and creative life.
Tonight, I sent 2 tracks to 2 friends just by talking to Rick.
I didn’t hit record once, or write any code by hand.
I just became a vibe coding believer.
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