This was an afternoon experiment, so read it in that spirit. The goal was to start real coding work by talking to a speaker: not "set a timer", but "work on the board script", and have an agent plan it with me and go and do it. No laptop open.
I gave myself a few hours, which means there are shortcuts everywhere. The backend is literally my laptop. The public entry point is a free tunnel. There is exactly one user, me, and no accounts. None of that would survive contact with real users, and I will come back to what a grown-up version looks like at the end. But the core turned out to be more interesting than I expected, because the main constraint forced a better design than the obvious one.
The wall everything runs into
Alexa cuts off a skill's response after about eight seconds. That is the whole design problem in one sentence.
A coding agent does not fit in eight seconds. Even just asking Claude to think of a few options for a task takes anywhere from four to twenty-plus seconds. So you cannot do the obvious thing, which is take what the person said, ask Claude about it, and speak the answer. Alexa will have hung up long before Claude replies.
