levelsio vibe-coded an Alexa skill to cancel Spotify

levelsio says he replaced the one thing he used Spotify for by building his own Alexa skill with Claude Code. He put coffee jazz MP3s he had purchased into an R2 bucket, had Claude Code help him stand up a skill in the Alexa Developer Console, and now saying "Alexa, coffee jazz" plays his own files. Claude Code, he says, calls it the Jukebox.

The starting point was annoyance, not ambition. A few posts earlier he asked whether a HomePod could just play a file or a YouTube stream on command, complaining that Alexa pushes him to Spotify or Amazon Music, that the music "kinda sucks" and that all he wants is basic coffee jazz. He added the obvious reply to himself, that he should hack the Echo and vibecode it, and then did exactly that.

@levelsio

@levelsio

X

Alexa forces me to get Spotify or Amazon music and 1) the music kinda sucks, 2) I just need basic coffee jazz

What the build actually involved

Per his write-up, Claude Code wrote a package.json and an index.js. He saved and built the skill in the console. Then he had to add a Routine to Alexa by hand so that "Alexa, coffee jazz" mapped to "Alexa, ask the jukebox to play coffee jazz". He says it also has Bossa Nova and Lofi, and that he can drop new music into the bucket whenever he wants and it plays automatically.

@levelsio

@levelsio

X

So I guess I can cancel Spotify now too

That split is the interesting part. The code was the fast bit. The slow bit was the platform, a developer console and a voice Routine, which is the part no model writes for you. Anyone copying this should budget their afternoon accordingly.

The business read

The cancel-the-subscription move has mostly been a developer tooling story so far, closer to Tony Dinh swapping a $124 translation SaaS for 75 cents of tokens. This is a consumer subscription going the same way, and the reason it went is not price. levelsio says the recommendations were terrible and always the same, and that this single use case was the only thing he used Spotify with Alexa for.

If you sell software, that is the warning. A customer who uses one feature of your product, badly served, is now a customer who can rebuild that feature in an afternoon and keep their own files. It fits what levelsio has been arguing for a while about personal software replacing bought software. One founder, one hobby project, no revenue attached. But the pattern is cheap enough now that it does not need to be a project.