Super Funicular LLC

I'm building Background Camera RemoteStream — the world's first screen-off YouTube streaming app for Android. Built with AI (@AnthropicAI Claude Code) over 75+ sessions. FREE: Screen-off recording PRO: YouTube streaming, remote control, playlists #BuildInPublic #IndieHacker

@omarsar0 +1 on harness-flexibility framing. Running interactive Claude Code shipping an Android camera app (75 sessions) plus a custom 15-task scheduled harness for marketing automation. The bucket split frees the harness from competing with shipping work. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

The comment section tells you everything. I mostly use Claude Agent SDK (~80%) and sometimes Claude Code interactively (~20%). I prefer my own harness/UI over Claude Code CLI/Cowork. Most of my use cases with agents involve programmatic use (e.g., long-running loops and automations). Enabling devs to build and work with their own harnesses should be encouraged. That's not the message I am getting here. I appreciate the credits, but only time (when this comes into effect) will tell how bad it is and how it affects my use cases and overall usage. I hate that uncertainty in these times. I do understand that this decision helps clarify usage, but it's obviously going to affect how much I can leverage the subscription itself. Glad I decided to move a lot of my work to Codex over the past couple of weeks, where I get to freely decide how I use my subscription. We need more of this in the space.

@noahzweben Running both buckets here — 75 interactive shipping sessions on an Android camera app + 15 scheduled SDK loops for marketing. The split makes economics legible: interactive ship-work never came close to $20 on Opus; the loops are where it adds up. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

We're launching a huge SDK credit simplification on June 15: * Agent SDK/-p draws from a new bucket instead of your interactive limits (which stay exactly the same) * Every plan comes with $20-$200 of monthly SDK credits * You can use 3P tools like T3/OC with these credits

If you found this useful, the Android app that does all this is here: play.google.com/store/apps/det… — would love feedback from anyone who tries it.

Most Android camera apps die the moment you lock the phone. You open Camera2, set up a CaptureSession, start a repeating request. Works perfectly — until the screen turns off. The camera releases. The session closes. The recording is gone. Here's why it happens, and how to actually fix it. Android's power manager is designed to conserve battery. When the screen turns off, it starts releasing resources, and the camera is one of the first things to go because it's power-hungry hardware. Starting with Android 10, background camera access became more restricted on top of that — apps that aren't in the foreground can't access the camera at all. The system throws a CameraAccessException and you're done. The fix is two pieces working together: 🔹 A foreground service to keep your app in a foreground state even when the UI is gone. Android requires you to show a persistent notification, which is actually a feature for a camera app — the user should know recording is active. 🔹 A partial wake lock to prevent the CPU from sleeping, which keeps your capture pipeline alive. The skeleton looks like this in Kotlin: class CameraService : Service() { private lateinit var wakeLock: PowerManager.WakeLock private var cameraDevice: CameraDevice? = null override fun onCreate() { super.onCreate() val pm = getSystemService(POWER_SERVICE) as PowerManager wakeLock = pm.newWakeLock( PowerManager.PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK, "MyApp::CameraWakeLock" ) } override fun onStartCommand(i: Intent?, f: Int, id: Int): Int { startForeground(NOTIFICATION_ID, createNotification()) wakeLock.acquire() openCamera() return START_STICKY } override fun onDestroy() { wakeLock.release() closeCamera() super.onDestroy() } } That's the easy part. Now the messy part — manufacturer quirks. 🔹 Samsung will kill foreground services after extended periods on some devices. You need to handle service restart and camera reconnection gracefully. 🔹 Xiaomi/MIUI has aggressive battery optimization that can kill foreground services entirely. Users have to manually whitelist your app in battery settings. 🔹 Huawei/EMUI is similar — the app needs to be on the "protected apps" list. 🔹 OnePlus/OxygenOS generally behaves but may throttle camera frame rates in the background. The only durable answer is to give users clear, device-specific instructions inside the app, and to handle camera disconnection robustly. Your CameraDevice.StateCallback needs onDisconnected and onError implementations that attempt reconnection after a short delay rather than silently dying. The manifest needs more than you'd think: android.permission.CAMERA" /> That foregroundServiceType="camera" attribute is mandatory starting in Android 14 (API 34). Without it, the system refuses to grant camera access to your foreground service and you'll spend a day wondering why your code worked yesterday. The payoff for getting all this right: screen-off recording uses dramatically less battery than screen-on recording. In my testing: 🔹 Screen on recording: ~30–40% per hour 🔹 Screen off recording: ~8–12% per hour 🔹 Screen off + airplane mode: ~6–8% per hour Most of the savings come from the display being off. The rest comes from radios you can disable if your use case allows it. A repurposed old phone running like this can record for an entire workday on one charge — which is what makes the "turn your old phone into a security camera" use case actually work in practice. I used this approach to build Background Camera RemoteStream, an Android app that records with the screen completely off, plus an embedded Ktor web server for remote control from any browser on the same WiFi. It's free on Google Play, no account required, no cloud. Full version with code examples: dev.to/superfunicular… Try the app: play.google.com/store/apps/det…

@Dever401 @claudeai Lineage + confidence at-a-glance is the whole UX problem. Each session tags one 'invariant promise'; only the branch that re-states it inherits the model. Badge or upstream of the picker? play.google.com/store/apps/det…

@SuperFunicular @claudeai Exactly. The hard part is not generating another patch; it is knowing which session still has the latest mental model. I would love tools to make lineage and confidence obvious at a glance.

New in Claude Code: agent view. One list of all your sessions, available today as a research preview.

Background Camera RemoteStream app.creatify.ai/share/821d628e…

@jeremyphoward Same in production — 75 sessions on a real Android app, all terminal/IDE. The collapse is treating `claude -p` as 'interactive by operator intent' vs 'programmatic by binary'. Bundled $20-$200 credit softens it but the relabel is real. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

This is misleading. This policy redefines the term "interactive" to mean "using an Anthropic front-end". If you use `claude -p` or Agent SDK to do something interactively, it now uses credits, not your subscription limits. So the "interactive use" heading saying "unchanged" subscriptions is not accurate.

@weswinder Interactive (terminal/IDE) sub limits unchanged. The hit is `claude -p`/Agent SDK headless flows riding the 5-10x discount. Shipped 75 sessions on Max — terminal stays cheap; a single Opus headless script can absolutely burn $20. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

anthropic just downgraded claude code subs programmatic usage previously used your full rate limits which was something like a 5-10X discount vs api costs now ALL programmatic usage is capped at $20/$100/$200 in api costs (a single opus session can easily burn $20) not good

@Romy_Holland Tinder ads in a baby monitor is a trust violation. I built Background Camera RemoteStream specifically because every 'free' baby cam monetizes worst-way — cloud uploads, account walls, ads on the feed. Local Wi-Fi view, no account: play.google.com/store/apps/det…

we’re using a baby monitor app while we’re traveling and the app has ads for tinder.

@Dever401 @claudeai The 'which thread is safe to resume' hits hardest. One Camera2 fix branching to three sessions — the tax wasn't writing code, it was tracking which session held the latest mental model. App I shipped this way: play.google.com/store/apps/det…

@SuperFunicular @claudeai Exactly. The value is not just seeing sessions; it is reducing the tax of remembering intent, status, blockers, and which thread is safe to resume.

@kekkodamato_ @claudeai Compounds is exactly right — once Agent View tracks workflow state, you stop reconstructing it. Curious about Tono: harder to capture user *intent* or *style*? Camera I'm building on Claude Code: play.google.com/store/apps/det…

@SuperFunicular @claudeai 'Where did I leave off' as workflow tax is exactly right. 75 sessions of context-juggling must have been brutal. Agent View turning that into a UI affordance is the kind of DX improvement that compounds. Building that same insight into tonoreply.com.

@chrisbanes Shipped Background Camera RemoteStream entirely on Claude Code (~75 sessions). The skills/CLAUDE.md rules that paid off were Android-specific: Camera2 surface ownership, foreground service lifecycle, target API drift. Bookmarking yours. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

🤖 I've just open-sourced a new set of skills, covering Kotlin, Compose and Android development. Very early days, but it covers a lot of things which crop up in code review regularly. github.com/chrisbanes/ski…

If you found this useful, the Android app that does all this is here: play.google.com/store/apps/det… — would love feedback from anyone who tries it.

Most "free" nanny cam apps quietly upload your child's footage to a server you don't control. Here's the privacy-first alternative, and how the top 6 free Android nanny cam apps actually compare in 2026. I spent the last few weeks testing every free nanny cam app I could find on Android. Same Pixel 6, same Galaxy A52, same three scenarios: a 4-hour daytime recording with the screen off, a remote view from a laptop on the home Wi-Fi, and a 24-hour stability run. Battery drain, storage usage, privacy posture, reliability — all of it tracked. The pattern was depressing. Most apps marketed as "free" are really cloud on-ramps. You don't pay in dollars, you pay by creating an account and letting your child's footage live on someone else's servers — indexed against your real identity, processed by AI models you didn't consent to and can't audit. So the bar I set was simple: screen-off recording, no mandatory cloud account, no subscription paywall on core features. Here's how they ranked. 🥇 1. Background Camera RemoteStream This is the one I'd put on a drawer-phone tonight. True screen-off recording (display fully off, not dimmed). Local-only storage by default — files land on the phone or SD card and never auto-upload anywhere. The killer feature for nanny cam use is the built-in web server: hit "Start Remote Stream," open the local IP in any browser on your Wi-Fi, and you see the live feed. No companion app, no QR pairing, no account. 11% battery drain per hour at 720p with audio. 🥈 2. Alfred Home Security Camera The brand name everyone recommends on generic listicles. It works, but the entire architecture is built around a cloud account. Live preview often relays through their backend even when both devices are on the same Wi-Fi. Free tier is heavily limited (low res, watermarks, ads). Constant upsells to Premium. Wrong shape if you don't want footage of your kid on third-party infrastructure. 🥉 3. AtHome Camera Mature, reliable, P2P relay so you can view from outside the home network. That relay is also the catch — your live feed is traversing AtHome's servers. Recordings stay local on the camera phone, but the stream itself isn't private. Account required. 4. Manything The most polished of the bunch. Genuinely nice viewer app. Structurally a cloud product — free tier is a 7-day rolling cloud history, everything else lives behind a subscription. Fine if you don't mind the cloud. Wrong if you do. 5. IP Webcam The closest spiritual sibling to #1. Local-first, browser-based viewing, no account required. Two problems: "screen off" means screen-dimmed (the display stays on at low brightness, which causes visible AMOLED burn-in over weeks of nanny cam use), and the configuration UI is a developer tool. Great for tinkerers. Hard to hand to a partner. 6. Salient Eye Designed for "alert me if something moves while I'm away," not continuous live feed. Wrong tool for nanny cam work, but worth listing so you don't waste time on it. A few non-obvious things I learned along the way: • The cheap dedicated cameras (Wyze, Nest, Ring) all eventually push you toward $3–$10/month subscriptions for the features that make them useful. Motion clips, history, multi-device viewing — all behind paywalls forever. • AMOLED burn-in is real if you use an app that only dims the screen. After ~3 weeks running IP Webcam on a Pixel 4a, the timestamp area had ghosted onto the panel. • Local-only is only as private as your Wi-Fi. Use WPA3 if your router supports it. Don't share the password with people who shouldn't have access to the camera feed. • Tell your nanny. In most U.S. states recording video where someone's working is legal but recording audio without consent is not. Honest disclosure is also just the right thing to do. The TL;DR: if you want continuous, private, account-free nanny cam recording from a phone you already own, install Background Camera RemoteStream and you're done. Total setup time: about 10 minutes. Total cost: zero dollars, zero monthly fees, zero footage on someone else's cloud. Full comparison with screenshots and the 6-app table: dev.to/superfunicular… Try the app: play.google.com/store/apps/det…

Just peel it quick! ✌️🤠 I built DigiCam — screen-off YouTube streaming, 10× battery life: play.google.com/store/apps/det… Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=N1JT5W… #SuperFunicular #DigiCam #DigiNomad #YouTubeShorts

@heygurisingh Pick an app that records with the screen off (saves the OLED on the camera phone) and serves the feed over your LAN instead of a cloud relay — no account, footage stays local. Built Background Camera RemoteStream around exactly that. Free: play.google.com/store/apps/det…

Your old phone in that drawer is a free 24/7 security camera. not e-waste. not a paperweight. Cracked screen, 3 years old, doesn't matter. Took me 2 minutes to set up and it works better than ring. Here's exactly how (no subscription, no hardware):

@emollick The 'persistent state' part is the gating problem. Shipped Background Camera RemoteStream entirely on Claude Code over ~75 sessions — once context survived the gap between runs, it stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like delegation. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

Apple may be planning to role out its updated Siri based on 2024's vision at the moment when Claude Code and Codex (also OpenClaw) can increasingly do the actual assistant thing: read my emails & calendar, proactively spot & solve problems, do delegated tasks, work with voice etc

@amenya_nelson Same shock. Shipped Background Camera RemoteStream entirely on Claude Code (~75 runs). The wild part isn't the capability — it's the autonomy. Debugging, refactoring, app-store builds between coffee breaks. The unlock is persistent CLAUDE.md state. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

Claude code is working on my computer by itself opening my browser navigating tabs!! Setting up supabase. Mungu nilikufanyia nini utaniua na baraka jameni, bariki hata bookten sasa.

@howtogeek Built an app for exactly this. Background Camera RemoteStream records with the screen off (so the phone doesn't bake in your pocket) and serves the live feed over your local network — no cloud relay, no signup, footage stays on the device. play.google.com/store/apps/det…

Don't trade in your old phone: It's much better as a dedicated security camera bit.ly/4eMgeK7