What changes when AI can take care of the tedious parts of building software, and help you try ideas that once felt out of reach?
Today we’re joined by Ivan Morgillo, an Android engineer, indie developer, and longtime tinkerer. Ivan explains why he treats AI as an assistant for the annoying work, from wiring up Home Assistant to managing a fleet of coding sessions from his phone.
We get into his agent workflow: using Claude Code as an entry point, asking several models to review plans and code, and building ship-feature to coordinate the process. Ivan also describes how he added persistent memory with MemPalace, originally to keep a long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign going across conversations.
The conversation ranges from jailbreaking a Kindle and using a webcam as a feedback loop, to custom hardware controls, fixing memory leaks in the Elgato Stream Deck app, and asking AI to “clean” a Chromecast. We finish with indie app ideas, the story behind Ivan’s Smart Pantry app, and his advice to live an interesting life so you encounter interesting problems to solve.
Enjoy the show 👨🍳
Show Notes
- 00.00 Intro
- 00.33 Episode Start
- 01.26 Meet Ivan Morgillo
- 04.31 His AI assistant handles the annoying stuff
- 08.00 Coding from anywhere with an always-on agent setup
- 11.21 How Ivan gets AI to plan, build, and review
- 15.27 Giving AI a memory for a D&D campaign
- 21.19 How AI helped jailbreak an old Kindle
- 27.05 Hardware hacking is back (thanks to AI)
- 38.50 Four models review every code change
- 43.46 What becomes possible when code gets cheap?
- 49.13 A pantry problem turns into a profitable app
- 52.17 The best ideas start with an interesting life
Resources
- Ivan Morgillo’s website - projects, writing, and links
- @hamen on GitHub
- @hamen on X
- Ivan Morgillo on LinkedIn
- ship-feature - Ivan’s open-source workflow for planning, implementation, and agent reviews
- MemPalace - local-first persistent memory for AI agents
- Home Assistant
- Kindle Gratis - find free Kindle books
- Smart Pantry - Ivan’s food and expiry-date tracking app
- Code with the Italians - Ivan’s podcast with Sebastiano
- MAKE by Pieter Levels - the book about building startups that Ivan mentions
Marco:
Nicola: