Very well, I was not really chatting or conferencing with a toy animal. My wife’s little tiger just served as a prop, since he was far more likely to stay put than any of our actual miniature tigers, I mean cats.
In any case, the point was not so much who I was chatting with but how: I was doing so using my very own little conferencing service, implemented in half an afternoon with prodigious coding help from Claude.
No, not “vibe coding”. I tried “vibe coding” and it’s not my cup of tea. Not because I am a control freak but because I like to know what my applications do and why, and how to fix and debug them. Moreover, I don’t mind owning the concept. That’s not the time-consuming part. The time-consuming part is implementation and this is where coding assistants, Claude in particular, excel. Don’t outsource combinatorial reasoning, like navigating the excessive landscape of design options. Nor do I need a coding agent type commands for me (and, on a bad day, wipe out my code base.) What I need the AI for is to write the routine stuff once the design is settled.
That is exactly what we did here, and the result… well, works. The concept is simple: Keep everything TCP. Of course TCP is the worst choice for real-time media streaming, except for the alternative: UDP works until it doesn’t, because it is blocked by a NAT-firewall, a mobile network policy, or something else. In fact, it was my struggle to get things run well in these post-Skype days that led me to my simple (but not simplistic) implementation: sending compressed, differenced video and audio at a bandwidth that remains manageable even with my self-hosted relay host for up to maybe half a dozen users.
The thing works. Granted, so far I only tested it with two users (me and me) but it works robustly and reliably even over a cellular connection. I might soon get a chance to test it with real users, some friends. Until then, I have my plush tiger to talk to.
All in all, 2000+ lines of good quality, working code in half an afternoon. That’s what a good AI assistant can do under competent supervision.