This is the coolest thing I've done with AI, and it has nothing to do with saving money.

I've been renovating a conference room. If you haven't dealt with Crestron: it's the stuff that runs the fancy rooms. One panel on the table, and it controls everything else in the room. It's also traditionally the domain of specialists. You call an integrator, they program it, and you hope you never need to change it.

I'd always wanted to learn this stuff. I just never had the time.

The gear

A CP4N processor, which I got on eBay, and a TS-770 touch panel. I'm a big fan of second-run pro A/V equipment. This stuff is usually treated very well, and it very often gets decommissioned well before the end of its useful life. The touch panel I already had, from one of our own decommissioned (and never actually used) A/V spaces. Somebody bought it, nobody used it, and now it runs my room.

What it controls:

  • Projector on/off
  • Video routing
  • Audio: mute buttons for 24 mics, plus levels for 2 sources and 3 destinations

No lights. That's a whole other post, from a different room.

How it went

Funny thing: Claude's first move was the traditional route. It gave me a simple SIMPL Windows program and a VT Pro-e touch panel file, plus a list of instructions for me to follow in those tools. Which is fine, except now I'm the one clicking around in Crestron's software, and I'm the slow part.

What unlocked the superpower was asking for SIMPL# and an HTML5 interface instead. That's all code. Claude could write it, build it, and fix it, and I stopped being the middleman.

The hard part was the DSP, a Tesira Forte. Getting its design file into a form Claude could work with was a challenge. So Claude wrote commands for me to run in the text console as diagnostics. I'd paste the output back, it would figure out the next step, and we'd iterate until it was right.

Beyond that, it was IP configuration issues and other run-of-the-mill stuff like that. Claude helped troubleshoot all of it and walked me through deploying to the actual hardware.

The part I want to be clear about

This isn't a story about replacing work that would have gone to an integrator. I wanted to do this myself. I've been learning all about it. The AI didn't take the job. It gave me a way into something I'd been interested in for years and couldn't find the hours for. I understand the system now in a way I wouldn't if someone had just installed it for me.

If you want to try this

The real secret sauce with Claude Code is text: text-based APIs and code. A point-and-click environment (or, as Salesforce likes to call it, declarative development) is your enemy. When the tool is point-and-click, the bottleneck is a human reading instructions and executing them.

Maybe Claude Cowork helps there. But that's a permission bridge I'm not willing to cross. So look for the text door into whatever you're working on: the console, the CLI, the code-based version of the tool. Use that.

That's the version of AI I'm most excited about. Not "do my job for me." More like "here's a door you've been staring at for years. It's open now."