Lego just got smarter

gm legends, happy Wednesday.

Today’s roundup: LEGO’s new smart brick makes builds light up and react when kids twist and swoosh them around, AgentNotch turns your MacBook notch into a tiny HUD so you can see what your AI agents are actually doing, and Too Many Buttons is a gloriously pointless little browser game that feels like peak old internet energy where you just click stuff to see what breaks.

LEGO Smart Play puts a tiny computer inside a standard 2×4 brick so your builds react when you twist, tap, or swoosh them around. Smart Bricks pair with special tags and minifigs to trigger sounds, lights, and motion effects in real time, all without screens, cameras, or an online connection. It stays compatible with regular LEGO pieces, so you still build the way you always have, just with extra chaos when ships fly or lightsabers swing. 

🔥 Our Take: Kids have always made the sound effects themselves, now the bricks are basically helping out. The nice part is that all the tech stays inside the pieces, so it feels like regular LEGO sessions, just with more noise and surprises instead of another tablet on the table.

Matt Carroll shared a full, nerdy breakdown of how he spent money in 2025, powered by the product he built for exactly this. Travel came out as his biggest category (van life instead of rent will do that), gas ate about 10 percent of his year, groceries spiked in places like Yosemite where food costs jump, and AWS plus a handful of subs quietly added more than he liked. He blew past his 30k target by about 8k and is aiming for 32.5k in 2026 instead, with tweaks like fewer meals out and lower infra bills.

If you like seeing real numbers instead of generic finance advice, it is a strangely satisfying look at what a FIRE-leaning, van-living indie founder actually spends in a year.

AgentNotch is a macOS menu bar app that lives in your notch and shows real time telemetry for your AI coding assistants. You see when Claude Code or Codex are reading files, calling tools, editing code, or hitting the shell, along with live token usage and cost estimates, all without losing screen space. It expands on hover, color codes each source, and you can set it up via Homebrew using the GitHub guide. 

🔥 Our Take: Working with AI dev tools is mostly staring at a spinner and hoping it is not quietly wrecking your repo or your bill. A little strip that tells you what it is touching, which model is active, how many tokens it is chewing, and when it is actually finished makes the whole thing feel a lot less sketchy. The subway surf clip while it thinks is just bonus brain candy.

Too Many Buttons is a tiny browser game where only one button actually works and every other click triggers some kind of nonsense. You poke around a wall of buttons, watch things break, flash, or misbehave, and try to find the one that quietly does what it’s supposed to.

🔥 Our Take: This is very old-internet energy in a good way. No leaderboard, no grind, no productivity spin. Just a ridiculous little toy that exists to waste a few minutes and remind you that people still build stuff purely because it’s fun to mess with. A nice palette cleanser between twelve “AI for your workflow” tabs.