Mike reports fixing his septic air pump with an $80 repair kit after considering a roughly $300 replacement. Joe walks through the podcast agent: cache the exports, review available analytics, propose focused longs and experiments, prepare a review package, then publish after approval.

Also: an HOA website waiting for a domain change, custom Slack emojis, hardware stories, and whether Claude can replace parts of a budgeting app.

This is a conversation about personal experience, not a pump repair tutorial. Costs and outcomes are Mike’s account. The production workflow still needs manual YouTube B/C setup; Spotify analytics are not yet connected despite the broader description in the conversation.

Build It Faster — season 1, episode 19.

Using Claude for home projects, Joel, Mike, and Joe discuss Home Assistant setup, self-hosting, and hands-on fault diagnosis.

Joel shares how a new home workshop changed his approach to 3D printing, why he assembled a personal radio station around his music library and cloned voice, and how Claude now handles configuration work he could do himself but does not have time for. Mike also explains how Claude helped him identify a torn diaphragm in an above-ground air pump; the repair kit still needed to be fitted at the time of recording.

They also get into:
- Three-legged versus four-legged tables
- Kids asking surprisingly difficult questions
- Proving intermittent ISP latency
- Wiring a new house for Ethernet
- Home Assistant automations and self-hosted services
- Building a neighbor’s website
- Orchestrators and a granularity gradient for software work

This is an informal project conversation, not a step-by-step repair, radio, or Home Assistant tutorial.

More Build It Faster: https://fasterpod.com

0:00 Meet Joel
9:25 A home workshop and 3D printing
18:10 Three legs, four legs, and wobbly tables
25:27 Curious kids and how things work
31:03 Candy detour
39:26 Joel FM: a personal AI radio station
42:43 Proving intermittent ISP latency
45:15 Wiring a new house
47:31 Claude for Home Assistant and self-hosting
51:19 A website for a neighbor
52:35 Diagnosing an air-pump failure
56:00 An orchestrator and a granularity gradient

Michael returns from a working road trip and catches up with Joe on a major refactor of their meeting app. They discuss separating board rules from networking and question whether peer-to-peer sync is still the right choice.

Then Michael describes how AI has changed his work as a PM: when he writes a small PR himself, when he hands a problem back to engineers, and what happened when a six-PR solution grew beyond his reach. They explore shared work with an agent in a Slack thread, time set aside to improve skills, and a customer-service lead who built a spreadsheet validation tool for her team.

The refactor and team workflows are works in progress. This conversation shares their choices and lessons, not a finished product demo or a universal process.

More Build It Faster: https://fasterpod.com