I Put AI on a 400x240 1-Bit Screen. You Read It with a Crank.

Two in the morning. The room is dark except for a rectangle of light no bigger than a playing card. I turn the crank and feel the small resistance in my fingertips — a faint clicking, something between mechanical precision and the warmth of a music box winding down. On the screen, text scrolls up one line at a time. Black and white. Nothing else. The AI's words arrive at the speed of my hand. I built CrankBot because every AI interface I've ever used feels the same. Text box. Send button. Browser window. Tokens streaming across a high-resolution display. The technology advances and the experience converges — toward what, exactly, no one pauses to ask. CrankBot goes the other way: AI on a Playdate , a $229 yellow handheld with a 400x240 monochrome display and a mechanical crank on the side. The whole thing is ~500 lines of Lua and ~80 lines of Python. MIT licensed. And it changed the way I think about what it means to read an AI's response. The impulse At AI-MY , we make things under th