I Just Hacked My Camera With Claude Code (and so can you)
A Fujifilm X-T5 plugged into a Mac, with Claude Code shooting photos, writing its own film recipe, re-rendering RAWs through the camera, and hitting a hard wall at the firmware.
Posted
3 days ago
Duration
Format
Demo
educational
Views
90.6K
1.4K likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Plugging a camera into Claude Code over USB lets an agent read, shoot, configure and batch-render photos in plain English, but the camera's undocumented image hardware is where the hacking stops.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A Fujifilm shooter who hates loading film recipes by hand or fighting Fuji X RAW Studio and wants a faster workflow.
A photographer or tinkerer curious what a coding agent can actually do against real hardware over USB, not just files.
Someone weighing the bricking risk of camera hacking who wants to see which steps are safe and which are not.
SKIP IF…
You shoot a camera brand with no USB tether or PTP support and don't want to adapt the steps yourself.
You want a finished in-camera Cinestill 800T look; the video ends with a post-production workaround, not a firmware mod.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Pat Simmons connects a Fujifilm X-T5 to a Mac over USB and lets Claude Code drive it. Using the open-source gphoto2 tool, Claude reads settings, switches film simulations, and shoots photos, including a face-triggered selfie script. It researches and builds its own Portra 800 style recipe, backs up the camera slots, and loads it, then uses the Fuji CLI tool to re-render 37 RAW files through the camera in about a minute. An attempt to add halation and bloom by editing firmware fails because the image processing runs on undocumented hardware, so Claude adds the effect on the Mac in post instead.
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Shows the X-T5 under Claude Code control and lays out the escalation from safe to risky.
00:49 – 02:57
02 · Connecting Claude Code to the X-T5
USB-C connection, tether shooting auto mode, and a warning about bricking risk.
02:57 – 03:29
03 · Claude takes a photo
Claude installs gphoto2, reads settings, switches to Astia Soft and then black and white and shoots.
03:29 – 06:16
04 · Claude builds its own Portra 800 recipe
Backup first, multi-agent research on Portra 800, recipe designed from a Fuji X Weekly base and loaded into slot C1.
06:16 – 08:54
05 · Selfie test with face focus
Claude shoots indoor and outdoor selfies, judges exposure numerically, and scripts face detection to trigger the shutter.
08:54 – 13:24
06 · Re-rendering RAW files without X RAW Studio
Claude pulls 48 files from the SD card, installs Fuji CLI, and renders the recipe onto 37 RAWs into a contact sheet.
13:24 – 15:51
07 · CineStill 800T and the firmware attempt
Halation and bloom are not camera options, so Claude researches firmware modding with a backup checklist first.
15:51 – 17:23
08 · Claude hits a wall
Claude finds the clarity code but cannot crack the lock, and discovers processing runs on undocumented hardware.
17:23 – 19:46
09 · Halation and bloom on the Mac
A guardrail trips, a fresh session proceeds, and Claude adds halation and bloom to the photos in post.
19:46 – 20:30
10 · Final thoughts
Recap of what worked, what did not, and a prompt to try the same on any camera.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Over USB tether, Claude Code can read every setting on a Fujifilm X-T5, change film simulations, and fire the shutter from a plain-English prompt.
Loading a film recipe into a Fuji by hand means changing grain, color and highlight settings one by one; an agent can write them to a custom slot in one pass.
Back up the camera's custom settings before any write, so a bad recipe or failed change can be restored.
Fuji's in-camera RAW conversion means the camera itself applies the recipe, so renders match straight-out-of-camera JPEGs exactly.
Claude can re-render a RAW through the camera in about 2.7 seconds, so 37 RAW files converted in roughly a minute.
Claude judged exposure from the image, measuring the face at a median brightness of 113 out of 255 against a target near 170, and adjusted ISO accordingly.
An agent can write a face-detection script that fires the shutter the moment your face enters frame.
Halation and bloom are not menu options on a Fuji, so no recipe can create them in camera.
Claude found the firmware code behind the Clarity setting, which behaves almost like bloom, but Fuji locks the firmware file so changes get rejected.
The real wall was hardware: photo processing runs on special Fuji silicon nobody outside the company has documented.
When the firmware route died, the workable path was a published Cinestill recipe in camera plus halation and bloom added on the Mac in post.
A safety guardrail tripped mid-session after firmware work, and opening a fresh session with the same prompt got past it.
Camera hacking carries real bricking risk, so research your own model's backup and firmware rules before copying anyone's steps.
Takeaway
What an agent can and cannot do to a camera
WHAT TO LEARN
Over USB, Claude Code can control a camera end to end in plain English, but real limits show up where documentation and open tooling stop.
02Connecting Claude Code to the X-T5
Connect the camera in tether mode, then ask Claude to read its settings first. A read-only first prompt proves the link works with nothing at risk.
Switch connection modes as the task needs: tether for shooting, USB RAW conversion and backup for loading recipes and rendering.
04Claude builds its own Portra 800 recipe
Ask for a backup of custom settings before any write, so a bad recipe can be reversed.
For a film recipe, have the agent research the target look from several sources, start from a published recipe, and apply its own judgment to skin tones.
05Selfie test with face focus
Let the agent measure exposure from the image. It reported median face brightness numerically, which is hard to judge by eye.
Scripts beat prompts for repeatable timing, such as a face detector that fires the shutter when you step into frame.
06Re-rendering RAW files without X RAW Studio
Use the camera's own RAW conversion path through an open-source tool so every render matches what the camera would produce, and 37 files take about a minute.
07CineStill 800T and the firmware attempt
Before any firmware work, run a checklist: double backup, save the official file, record its footprint, and prove an exact unpack and repack.
08Claude hits a wall
Expect hard limits. Fuji locks its firmware and runs processing on undocumented hardware, so some in-camera effects cannot be added.
09Halation and bloom on the Mac
When the camera route is closed, use post-production. A published recipe for color and grain plus halation and bloom added on the computer got close to Cinestill 800T.
If a guardrail interrupts a legitimate task, a fresh session with the same prompt can proceed, but treat any hacking steps with the risk they carry.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Film recipe
A saved combination of in-camera settings such as film simulation, grain, color and highlight curves that imitates a specific film stock.
Halation
A red glow around bright lights, caused by light bouncing through film stock that lacks its anti-halation layer, as with Cinestill 800T.
Bloom
A soft glow that spreads from bright highlights into surrounding areas of the image.
gphoto2
An open-source command-line tool that controls many cameras over USB, used here to read and change the X-T5's settings and take photos.
USB RAW conversion
A Fuji connection mode where RAW files are sent back to the camera, which applies a recipe and returns a finished image.
Ghidra
A free reverse-engineering suite released by the NSA that disassembles and decompiles compiled software such as camera firmware.
“When you start to combine Claude's knowledge with its ability to create film recipes, apply them in post, and hack the firmware, it is pretty incredible what you can do with Claude and your camera now.”
clean summary of the whole video→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
17:22
“The actual photo processing happens on special Fuji hardware that has never been documented anywhere.”
a clear, surprising limit of the experiment→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
So this is my Fujifilm X -T5. And this is Claude Code running inside of it. I type what I want in plain English to Claude, and Claude changes the film simulation, it fires the shutter, it drops photos straight into my Mac.
And over the last few weeks, people have been hacking their cameras with Claude, doing things like adding continuous autofocus to a Hasselblad, turning an old Canon into a film camera, even shooting Doom on a Fuji. So in this video, I'm gonna see how far it goes on my Fuji X -T5. We'll first start with the safe stuff, shooting, loading film recipes straight into the camera, rendering raw files on any look then we'll get into some of the more risky stuff where Claude tries to add things Fuji never put in the camera and we will see hopefully it doesn't brick my 1700 camera here either way you'll see exactly how I did it and which parts are safe to try on your own camera let's get right into it so first up this is exactly how to connect Claude code to your camera it's incredibly easy to do let's go over to Claude code right now I already have a new folder open I'm using Opus 55 set to medium effort and with Claude open all you need to do is take your plug a USB -C into your computer, and then plug the other end of that USB -C into your camera.
And then once your camera's connected, this will be different if you're using something other than the Fuji X -T5. I'm just going to go through my connection settings with the Fuji. But if you're using a different camera, I would just go to Claude and I'd say, hey, I want you to access my X model camera.
How would I go about doing this? But in my Fuji X -T5's case, what I need to do is go to network slash USB settings, go to connection mode and change it to usb tether shooting auto and let's see if it finds it boom there we go yes i can see it a usb device is connected that belongs to the fuji and there we go so let's start playing with it we're going to begin with the basics and then we'll get more and more complex as we move through these examples as well as more risky which now would be a good time to mention this is for demonstration purposes only proceed to your own risk if you're doing this yourself know that there will be a likelihood of bricking your camera but i'm just kind of curious how much we can push with this and i think claude is more than capable but uh we're about to find out so we'll start with the first basic prompt i'm just gonna say all right i want you to figure out how to control my xt5 from this mac just tell me what it's set to right now just start clicking buttons all of these prompts by the way will be available in the blog post below as well as a full setup guide so you can just copy and paste this directly into your agent it looks like it does have to do a few things over homebrew so gh photo 2 it's installing and it's going to actually connect to the xt5 and we will see the cloud can start control
And it just installed GH Photo 2. And then I just needed to wake up my camera. Try again.
The Mac sees the X -T5 now. Checking the X -T5's firmware. Yeah, my firmware's probably out of date.
So I may need to update that. But in the meantime, it's connected to the X -T5 and it reads its settings. It only read through and changed nothing.
So yeah, it can see exactly what my settings are. 1 over 60, F2 .8, ISO 500. So it reads all of those settings from the camera.
So with it fully connected, what we'll do now is... it actually take a photo so i'm just going to say switch to astia soft take a photo and save it to my desktop and then i'll just grab my camera here and whoops i was moving my camera around let's go reshoot when steady and boom there we go just took the photo and let's just have it one more time change to a fujifilm recipe so i can show you it doing that in real time change to another recipe please black and white Look at that.
Look at that punchy contrast. Okay, so we've got Claude connected. It can read every setting on the camera.
It can change them. It could switch the film simulations. Now, of course, Claude isn't going to be going out there taking photos for you in the wild.
So let's get a little bit more practical with this and have it come up with its own film recipe. There, of course, are a lot of these online, but I'm going to defer to Claude and it just designing its own. If you've ever loaded in these recipes too, it's a complete nightmare because you literally have to go by hand, change your settings one by one.
You know, the grain, colors the highlights all of that and then you finally just get their recipe there's no really easy way to load in a recipe maybe there isn't just not familiar but it's something that has always taken me a long time to do so we're gonna have claude do this for us as well as come up with his own fujifilm recipe so we're gonna go off of like a classic portrait 800 really soft skin tones just that beautiful looking portrait look and just see how close claude can get to this mimicking this portrait using its own taste so we'll just go to claw and we'll enter in this prompt i'm saying back up my custom settings first just in case anything breaks and then say find a popular codec portrait 800 film recipe for the xt5 and then i'm saying use your own taste to tweak it so skin tones look really good like real portrait 800.
i'm gonna add just to get crazy with this i'm gonna say research the living crap out of how to mimic portrait 800 as close as possible don't just rely on the film recipe that you find spawn multiple agents to help you out in researching how close we can get to portrait 800 i bet there's a lot of blog posts resources out there that where people talk about this so do that research first then create your own film recipe recipe final I'm saying loaded into C1 name the slot clogged truck 800 and then take a test photo with it and research is back let's just take a peek at what it came up with what real portrait 800 looks like according to Kodak's own data sheet and several film labs skin warm peach gold with a slight orange lean saturation yeah of course it's the most saturated tones shadows are rich and deep blacks a little lifted that sounds right noticeably greener than portrait 400 I don't know if that's actually true I guess it's just like different type of grain yep this makes sense greens are slightly
muted and olive. Okay. Not exactly new information, but maybe it will help influence Claude's own version.
And then it looks like, okay, it's starting from Fuji X Weekly's Portrait 800 V3, which is built for the X -T5 and its sensor. Okay. And then it designed the recipe.
You'll also just be able to, in the blog post, click copy for your agent at the top, and then you can just feed this directly into your agent and it can upload this recipe for you if you are connected to Claude. So, okay, cool. So we have this recipe done.
Now we need to get Claude to actually save it to my X -T5. And here's where it takes human intervention because Claude can't actually do this.
And it is switching the camera's connection mode to USB raw slash backup. So I'm just going to do that now. If you have a Fuji, all you need to do is go to the exact same menu that we went to last time.
So we'll go menu connection mode, USB raw, C -O -N -V slash backup restore, plug that back in for Claude and it should be able to add in this recipe. And then with that, we'll just go back to Claude here, say switch to go. All right, we've got Claude in C1 now.
So let's test this baby out. Rather, let's have Claude change it.
Okay, change it to ClaudeTRA800. Then I'm going to take a selfie. And what I want you to do is in real time, focus on my face and then just take the photo.
One thing I forgot to do is just change it back to USB tether shooting auto. So I'm doing that now. Plugging it back in.
Connect. Ready. Shoot.
See how good a photographer you are, Claude. Okay, we got it, but I was looking away. So I'm going to tell Claude to take it one more time.
Take that one more time. And then I need you to, oh yeah, indoor version. Yeah, make an indoor version too.
Screw it, why not? But you're going to need to adjust, like actually use your vision to look at the camera settings and adjust the aperture, shutter, ISO, whatever you need to do to get this exposure set correctly. And then tell me when I need to be ready to take the photo.
One thing I just had to do was change the ISO dial to C and the shutter to T for Claude to take control of the actual exposure. And it looks like it's ready to take a selfie now. Look at that.
Just took that immediately. Oh, there it is. Hey, well done.
I mean, the skin tones look pretty good. Kind of a moody photo. I really like the grain.
For an indoor shot, no natural light, just this big soft box. Looking pretty darn good. All right, Claude, well freaking done.
And then this is the really cool thing with Claude too, is when it uses its vision, it can get so methodical and scientific with the actual exposure. So it's doing things like, one thing to improve, your face measures a bit darker than the portrait target. Its median brightness is 113 out of 255 against about 170.
for slightly overexposed. So it's so scientific with exposure. And so, yeah, makes sense.
It is a little bit darker, but that's something that I would never be able to detect myself. So yeah, sure, why not? Let's brighten and reshoot.
Change that ISO to 1250 and see how it works. Go here, one more selfie. Pose for this one.
Boom heard that shutter go off. Look at that Look at this. Oh god.
Hey, great. Great shot much brighter Maybe even a little too bright on this side of the face Claude. Let's see if Claude analyzes that and sees that like highlights are definitely blown out on the left side of the face there but let's take a look and see your face is evenly and brightly lit and only 0 .6 of the frames blown out interesting i beg to differ claude but you are smarter than i am another cool thing was doing is it actually wrote a script to detect my face so the minute my face came into view that's when the shutter would automatically go off so it's like crazy things it can do that you would just never think of now granted if you're shooting this as a normal human you know how to detect faces and press the shutter at the given time but you get i'm saying it's cool that claude can actually just completely do this programmatically pretty cool stuff so we've given claude the ability to research fuji recipes load them directly into the camera without me having to touch anything next we're going to continue to get more and more complex with this by having claude apply the fuji recipe that we just created to existing photos of mine and this has always been one of the most annoying things about fuji you can do it in bulk in fuji x raw's studio application but any fuji user will know that this thing is an absolute
freaking nightmare to use. The software looks like it's from freaking 1996. It's slow.
I don't even know what's going on here. And yeah, I guess I need to change the connection mode, but anyone that's actually done this and done any sort of post -processing in Fuji X raw studio to apply Fuji recipes to their raw photos, it's really quite obnoxious. So we can just not use this freaking application anymore and have Claude do everything.
So I'm just going to tell Claude, can you find some raw photos in my files anywhere, anywhere on my computer? I think I have some raw photos somewhere, maybe. even within this camera.
And the goal here is to skip Fuji X Raw Studios processing of film recipes and just apply the recipe that we just created to raw camera files that I have. So you can use the Clotra 800, either daylight or indoor, and just go ahead and create a contact sheet of a bunch of those different photos. And so what Claude's gonna be doing here is just gonna be talking to the camera directly.
It's gonna work the same way that Fuji's app does where each photo goes back into the camera. The camera itself applies the recipe. So it looks exactly like it.
would straight out of the camera. And then the finished photo comes back to my computer. And so I'll have those files directly on my computer and Claude will use those files to organize them into a proper contact sheet.
Okay, so in the middle of this, I realized that it has to be Fuji RAW files. So it can't just be any RAW files that may have already occurred to you. I thought, I don't know, maybe I could use a RW, like Sony RAW files, but it has to be Fuji's RAW version of this.
And I realized that I usually shoot on JPEG with this Fuji camera. So I didn't actually have any RAW files. So I just went out, took a few photos.
And so now it's on my... Fuji camera. And I'm just going to tell Claude to access those raw files and then convert them into something.
And we'll look at a contact sheet and we'll load a couple different Fujifilm recipes to see which one looks the best with these raw files. All right. So it looks like it found these raw files in the SD card.
It pulled 48 files from today and then it's just copying over. It looks like it has to copy over one file at a time into a folder. It can't actually do this through a batch request, which is fine.
Claude's just going to do this one by one. All right. Looks like it's done.
And then, okay. Interestingly, I didn't realize this.
There's something called Fuji CLI, which is an open source tool to access this. So this will be, by the way, in the blog post below on how to actually do this. And I'm just going to tell Claude to access that GitHub repo and build this.
Fuji CLI, just in case you're curious, here is the GitHub repo for you to access. This is just an open source tool that someone built. So proceed with caution in accessing this yourself.
But it looks like this is the quickest way to start applying our film recipe to our raw files. And by the way, this open source repo repo Fuji CLI it's not the only way for Claude to apply film recipes to raw files any tool that speaks Fuji's USB protocol could do these raw conversions Claude technically could have written its own version from the protocol notes that other developers have already published these are pretty readily available online but the person behind Fuji CLI has already done a lot of that work so that's why we're using this open source repo it's just saving Claude a little bit of time so it doesn't have to write this completely from scratch Fuji CLI is installed I just have to switch back to USB raw conversion so I switch that on my xd5 all right i just rendered the first photo took 2 .7 seconds claude is now rendering the other 36 and boom so claude took those raws and applied our claudra 800 recipe here's this contact sheet here uh it's just a sample photo i took see here's the raw file here's a recipe here's some photos i took outside raw file our recipe i just did this and it took claude probably a minute to do all these conversions another photo same photo terrible
Decent photo. More of that. Highlights are completely blown out.
Another thing you can do too is just go to Claude and say, hey, look at the highlights that are blown out. Can we recover anything? Some of these are terrible.
Don't look at these. But yeah, I just took a lot of these photos. Okay, let's play in with some reflections.
You can see the difference in the raw file here. In our Claude Tra 800, it does look a little funky since it's kind of an overcast day to be shooting with such warm tones with our Claude Tra 800, but it does not matter. This is only for example's sake.
And we get some leaves falling in here as well. Nice little well. time shot if i don't say so myself and there we go so that is claude taking a batch of raw fuji files and applying a film recipe in one go without us having to open this gosh darn fuji x -ros studio application so we now have given claude the ability to apply a custom film recipe that it itself has created next we're going to be really pushing it to the limit here and i'm going to see if claude can recreate cinestill 800t which i like to call the abandoned gas station film stock cinestill if you're not familiar is this very old school cinema like filmic type look since still 800t photos it's actually kodak movie film with one of its protective layers stripped off and that missing layer is where its whole look comes from it's one of my favorite film stocks it's free beautiful, especially at night shooting exterior scenes with a bunch of different lights.
In this photo, you can see the red glow around the lights, which is called halation. And then the soft glow and the highlights here, that's called bloom. So what we're going to do is have Claude recreate cinestill 800T.
Now the issue with this is it's not as easy as the portrait 800 recipe that we just created because halation and bloom aren't actually options anywhere in the Fuji menus. So there's no setting for Claude to just switch on. So I'm not sure exactly how this is going to work.
And this is where we run into a real risk because I believe we have no other option than to update the firmware. And if we modify the firmware incorrectly, it could end up breaking this entire camera.
Yeah, I know this is ridiculous, but I have faith in Claude. So we're going to be very methodical about this. I actually had a separate agent already write up a research document for this Claude to access to do everything we can in just backing stuff up and instructing it on how to modify the firmware.
So let's see where this goes. So here's the other Claude agent's research that I put together on how to do this as safely as possible based on what people who have already modded other cameras have learned and in a second i'll tell this cloud agent to follow this exactly so let's go ahead and just let claude run through this backup first all these files by the way will be available in the blog post below but again i just want to re -emphasize proceed with caution proceed at your own risk because there's a real risk here so while it's running that backup i'll just get a little bit more in depth here on the actual backup checklist so in our research claude found the rules that people follow when they mod their cameras without bricking them so we're just going through this checklist one by one backing up the settings twice saving the official firmware file onto the mac copying everything off the sd card that's what it's doing right now and then some more stuff here in this firmware safety dock stuff like claude recording the firmware files footprint so it knows it's working on the exact official file and then proving it can unpack the file and pack it back up exactly the same way before it changes anything you'll probably want to have claude do some extensive research on your own camera and not just use my resources here but at least be a good starting point if you are trying to do something similar i am downloading the fujifilm
app installer. Not totally sure what that is, but trust in Claude. Oh boy.
So we are going down a rabbit hole. Claude hit a wall. It wasn't able to unlock this firmware and it even found the code behind the camera's clarity setting, which works almost exactly like bloom, but Fuji just puts a lock on this file.
And if Claude changes anything without cracking that lock, the camera won't accept it. So we're seeing what we can do to unlock this. I said, use the reverse engineer, anything, GitHub repo.
You might be familiar with reverse engineer, anything. It uses Ghidra, I believe it's pronounced. So we just downloaded that via the National Security Administration's GitHub repo.
Yes, we may be crossing a bit of a line. We're not breaking any laws, are we? I'm not a lawyer.
So take this as general information, not legal advice. Okay. Claude is saying it's not a crime, even though Claude's not a lawyer.
Perfect. Keep going. And just to be clear exactly what's happening right now, what Claude's doing.
So it was looking to find the code to change, which it found once we downloaded the firmware of Fuji's latest version, it found that clarity code, which already will do most of what we need to get bloom. The next step it's doing right now is trying to crack Fuji's lock. If we're able to crack Fuji's lock, then the next thing is to actually edit the clarity code.
So it glows only around the bright light. and then also tint that glow red for halation. So we'll have bloom and halation.
And then the final step is actually installing it on the camera. This is the actual firmware install. Darn.
So Claude got deep into this. It took the firmware apart and found that the actual photo processing happens on special Fuji hardware that has never been documented anywhere. There's no hidden Halation setting to unlock.
You'd have to reprogram that hardware and no one outside Fuji knows how. So this is where it stops. I don't want to push it any further, but it is pretty wild what Claude was able to do by decompiling the firmware and just digging into the code.
Now there is another option my separate Claude research agent found for Halation and Bloom without having to touch the firmware. So that's what we're going to do. right now.
And so I'm just going to hit Claude with this prompt. Load the Cinestel 800T recipe from halationbloom .md into C3, then take the photos I shot with it and add halation and bloom on the Mac using the method in halationbloom .md. Okay, we hit some.
Now we hit guardrails? Seriously? After taking apart Fuji's firmware, we are now getting hit with a security notice.
So I don't think the safety guardrails are triggered from this prompt. So what I'm going to do is just open a new session and see if we can get this added here. Paste that in and boom, it looks like it's working.
So what we were doing with this route is my camera is going to handle the cinestill colors and grain with a recipe that someone has published and then claude is going to add that halation and bloom on the mac afterwards so i'm not actually able to get the cinestill 800t look in camera i mean i can but i'm using another person's recipe that hasn't done a very good job with halation and bloom but what claude's going to be able to do is in post production and post processing add the halation and bloom on my mac so at least we can do that after and if i actually wanted to use this i could just shoot in raw and then have claude edit this in batches in post all right All right, so our cinestill halation post -production is all done.
Let's check out how these are looking. So here is the raw file of this example, and here is the halation and bloom. Okay, not bad.
I mean, this was shot in daylight, but yes, you can absolutely see bloom and halation in the reds. Not exactly cinestill looking, but not bad. And then we have here, I mean, this, you know, this, it does kind of look like cinestill, but of course these highlights are blown out, so it's really hard to tell.
And we have all of these other examples. I think the best one, yeah, I mean, here, these highlights. Definitely see that.
Anytime we have highlights, you really can, of course, see the bullet modulation, just like you would with Cinestill. Maybe it's a little aggressive, but hey, I mean, not bad for something we just made up with Claude. And the beauty of this too, of course, is you don't need to be doing this yourself, like tweaking any of these settings or anything like that.
Like I can just go back to Claude and I can say, okay, decrease that a bit. It's a little too aggressive, stuff like that to really lock this in. You could even, if you wanted to get crazy with it, do some sort of reinforcement learning where you're just feeding Claude different images of real Cinestill 800T.
and then say, how do we get close to this? And then just have it go in a loop to really get close to 800T. And you can really do that with any film recipes.
So when you start to combine Claude's knowledge with his ability to create, you know, Fujifilm recipes, apply those in post, hack the firmware, if you're willing to take that risk, it is pretty incredible what you can do with Claude and your camera now. So overall, even though we hit some roadblocks, you can see what you can do hacking your camera with Claude just by plugging it into your computer and then having Claude take over and do the rest.
We, of course, weren't able to modify the firmware. And honestly, I'm glad we... didn't, but I did want to see how far we could get.
And we still were able to do some pretty cool stuff. Cloud was able to take photos, build a film recipe, load it right into the camera, re -render 37 raw photos without having to open Fuji X. It took the firmware apart to see how the camera actually processes a photo.
So pretty fun. Like I said, the blog post below will have instructions on how to do this yourself. Proceed at your own risk.
And if you're not in the Fuji ecosystem, you can once plug in your camera and just go to Cloud and say, let's take this thing apart, see what we can do. And that's going to do it for this one. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.
Happy modding and I'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Pat Simmons plugs a Fujifilm X-T5 into a Mac and lets Claude Code take over, starting with reading settings and ending with taking apart the camera's firmware.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:33model
Safe to risky escalation
Read settings
Shoot and change simulations
Load a recipe
Batch render RAWs
Firmware modification
Each step gives the agent more control over the camera and carries more risk, so you stop at the level you are comfortable with.
Steal forany agent-controls-hardware experiment
14:40list
Camera firmware safety checklist
Back up settings twice
Save the official firmware file
Copy everything off the SD card
Record the firmware file footprint
Prove unpack and repack are identical before editing
Rules drawn from people who modded cameras without bricking them, run before any firmware change.
Steal forany device firmware experiment
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
20:27link
“The blog post below will have instructions on how to do this yourself. Proceed at your own risk.”
Low-key pointer to the blog post and newsletter in the description, with the risk warning repeated.
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One-shot, no revisions, deployed live: a retro iPod app, a scrubbable D-Day reconstruction, and a Nuketown FPS clone, built back to back by two frontier coding models.
A creator walks through cloning a $2 billion venture-backed dictation app in one Claude Code session, then benchmarks his free local build against the real thing.
A creator builds daemon, a single Mac app that runs every AI coding agent he owns, by giving Claude Fable 5 four rounds of blunt feedback instead of writing a line of the UI himself.
An 8-step agentic pipeline that takes you from naive AI slop to a pixel-near Linear replica, deployed to Vercel with an MCP server, in under 20 minutes.
A new OpenAI endpoint skips writing an answer and just hands back odds. Pat Simmons races it against Jev and a regular chat model, then builds seven real tools with it live.
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