Terminal showing a script reporting zero matches for a quote a subagent claimed was on a Google policy page

How to Check a Cheap Claude Code Subagent's Research Before You Believe It

I handed two Claude Code subagents a research job. Both ran on Haiku to keep the cost down, and both came back with tidy tables, exact quotes and source URLs. Then I opened the sources, and a fair amount of what they’d told me was wrong. This post is what I found, and the small script I now use before acting on anything a cheap subagent tells me. What I asked them I had a Claude Code session working through SEO and AdSense compliance on this blog, and I spun two background subagents off it with the model set to Haiku: ...

October 23, 2026 · 6 min · Tom Cocking
Black 10.1 inch Android photo frame showing a stock photo of a man holding a child, beside the title Photo frame to Home Assistant dashboard

Turn a £50 Android Photo Frame Into a Home Assistant Dashboard: Root From Windows, Then Fully Kiosk

Wes Bos put out a video about rooting a $50 Amazon photo frame and running a family dashboard on it. The frames are Android tablets with a vendor app bolted on, and his photo-frame-dashboard repo is written so you can point a coding agent at it and let it do the fiddly bits. I wanted the same thing for Home Assistant, so I ordered the UK listing of the frame he linked and spent a day on it with Claude Code. ...

October 13, 2026 · 15 min · Tom Cocking
Diagram of a phone watching over VNC via Tailscale while Claude Code drives Playwright MCP and a Chromium container on an always-on dev VM

How to Give Claude Code a Real Browser: Headful Chromium in Docker with Playwright MCP

A couple of weeks ago I asked Claude, via the Chrome extension on my Windows laptop, to find me the best-value used M1 MacBook Air on eBay. It was properly good at it. It searched with sensible filters, opened listings, read the descriptions for battery cycle counts and “cracked screen” small print, and left the three best tabs open for me to look through. Then I tried to picture doing the same from my phone on a day I’ve left the laptop at home, talking to the agents on my always-on dev VM. There’s no browser there. Claude Code’s web fetch tool gets blocked or served a stripped-down page by most retailers, eBay included. So I gave the VM its own browser: a real, headful Chromium in a Docker container. Claude drives it through Playwright MCP, I can watch and take over from my phone over VNC, and it’ll crop screenshots straight into this blog. Every image in this post came out of it, the cover included. ...

September 25, 2026 · 16 min · Tom Cocking
Diagram showing a laptop connecting over Tailscale to a persistent dev VM running T3 Code and Claude Code

How I Turned My Laptop Into a Dumb Terminal With a Tailscale Dev VM, T3 Code, and Claude Code

For about as long as I’ve been doing this, my laptop has been the computer: the IDE, the Docker daemon, forty browser tabs, all of it running locally, all of it dying the second the battery does or the lid has to close for a meeting. That model finally broke this year - not because of some clever trick, but because I moved the actual computer off the laptop entirely. The laptop’s job now is to open a window onto a machine that never sleeps, never loses its state, and honestly doesn’t care what OS it’s running. ...

September 24, 2026 · 9 min · Tom Cocking

Give Claude Code Eyes Inside Your WSL2 Docker Containers

If you run Docker inside WSL2 on Windows 11, you’ve probably hit this wall: you open a Claude Code session in Windows Terminal, something goes wrong with a container, and Claude starts asking “can you paste the logs?”. Every. Single. Time. It breaks the flow completely. The whole point of an agentic coding tool is that it should be able to diagnose problems itself, not act as a fancy chat window that waits for you to do the investigation manually. ...

April 23, 2026 · 8 min · Tom Cocking