In this post from June 7, 2026, Mark Dembo (Head of Solutions – Developer Platform & AI at Cloudflare) recounts a Sunday tinkering project: building himself a DIY AI agent from a small M5Stack Stick 3 device bought for ~€30, inspired by Steve Ruiz and motivated by the release of Opus 4.8. The watchword: "There is no goal. Pure exploration and curiosity. And that feels just great."

First iteration (45 minutes). He throws the device's documentation at Claude Code, which produces Python scripts of about 200 lines. Since they have "zero blast radius," he allows himself not to care about the code. The flow stays human-in-the-loop (not very "2026" for his taste): Opus generates, he copy-pastes into the UIFlow web interface, runs it, and reports the result back. His role shrinks to three functions — idea generator, executor, and judge. A Cloudflare Workers + Workers AI backend quickly adds text-to-speech, push-to-talk (speech recognition), and a central small LLM: the object listens, answers, and cracks bad jokes.

Second iteration. Aiming for a real agent, he points Opus at the Cloudflare Agents SDK, switches from REST to WebSocket transport, and enables Dynamic Worker execution — unlocking his preferred pattern, "Code Mode": the agent writes and executes code to accomplish its task. Given internet access, the agent computes 11! with a one-liner, finds the Champions League winner via fetch() on Wikipedia, and gives the weather for any city. Its limit: no access to private data.

Third iteration. He connects Todoist via an MCP OAuth flow (added in a few minutes by Claude) — and instantly inherits 50 tools, hence two problems: context bloat and a real blast radius (a bad call could destroy a critical task). His fix, drawn from Cloudflare's MCP Server Portal and Claude connectors: set each tool to Always allow / Ask for approval / Disable — disabled tools never enter the context, an LLM classifier accepts only explicit authorizations, and default is deny.

What he did not do: no latency optimization, no evals, no optimistic calls — "I did not even look at the code once. And you know what? That's the nice part of it." The final sense of wonder is less about the capability than about its accessibility: €30 and a few cents of inference for an object one drives in natural language.