Chromecast VPN wouldn't connect. Claude wrote a client in 20 minutes.
Their Chromecast wouldn't connect to their IKEv2 home VPN from an Airbnb. Told to fix it, Claude found no way to make the existing VPN apps work, so it wrote a new client. About 20 minutes, plus their certs.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user leptons· Oct 20, 2026
Result Also patched Plex after an update broke its whole UI
“It figured out there was no good way to make the existing VPN client apps work on my chromecast, so it wrote a new VPN client for me that works perfectly, all in about 20 minutes without me needing to do much more than supply my certs.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Their Chromecast wouldn’t connect to their IKEv2 home VPN while they were at an Airbnb, so they told Claude to fix it.
How it went
Claude figured out there was no good way to make the existing VPN client apps work on the Chromecast, so it wrote a new VPN client that works perfectly, in about 20 minutes, needing little more from them than their certificates. It has fixed other things for them too. When a Plex update broke the Chromecast UI, with file names and thumbnails overlapping, Claude got the latest .apk and fixed it without them touching a command line, taking screenshots of the Chromecast screen to check the result; it also added the media duration below the title and fixed the delete feature. On their phone, it patched SmartTube’s .apk to show 100+ thumbnails, where they say the official app only shows 5 videos.
Try it yourself with Claude
When a vendor's official app can't do something you need, like [connecting your streaming device to a VPN protocol it doesn't support], describe the exact behavior you want to [Claude or another coding agent] and ask it to build a small purpose-built client or patch, rather than hunting for an app that may not exist.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
An old printer stopped working with MacOS 27. Claude wrote new drivers, using its owner as eyes and hands: did grayscale work, did page 1 print at lower DPI, now reload the paper for duplex. Then it printed again.
Devialet's official app was abandoned. Claude and Codex reverse engineered the amplifiers' private protocol and built an iOS controller in about a day of work. Without AI, they'd never have started.
A Santa hat, a hidden Bluetooth speaker and a cloned voice reading lines Claude wrote. At Christmas it sorted the kids, and declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
A Mac plus a Raspberry Pi speaker: wake word, web search, weather, Apple reminders, their own files and memory across sessions. And you can talk over it mid-reply to interrupt.
No algorithm, no rabbit holes. The child searches and requests, the parent taps Approve, and only approved videos play, with youtube.com blocked. Built entirely by a non-developer with Claude.