A 10-Year-Old Air Mouse | Directing Claude Code from the Couch to Dig Up 7 Schools of AI Creators

I can already operate AI by voice.

XNTJ Voice, the voice input method I built myself, already handles most of my typing. But “press 1234,” arrow keys, and “hit Enter to confirm” are unavoidable — and when I’m curled up on the couch talking to AI on the TV, getting up and walking over to the keyboard just to press Enter is idiotic.

The best AI remote control I’ve found lately turns out to be a gadget from 10 years ago — the air mouse.

1. Why an air mouse

Taobao has everything. I bought a pile of similar gadgets to compare, and this is the one that survived.

What it solves:

• Motion mouse — smoother to move than a trackpad
• Full keyboard — you can type if you want to
• Bluetooth — doesn’t occupy a USB port
• Scroll wheel — hold it down and it scrolls up and down like a mouse wheel
• Some models even have a noise-cancelling mic built in

One device replaces three.

2. Directing Claude Code lying down

I used it to demo a round of multi-agent research — the topic being “AI creators doing well across the various video platforms.”

I dictated the task by voice:

“Research the AI creators doing relatively well on each video platform. Their positioning, video length, topic-selection approach, language style, and opening hooks. Assemble a multi-agent team and search concurrently across multiple dimensions.”

I hit send and Claude Code asked a few questions back: the boundaries of what counts as an AI creator, the platform scope, and what the research was for. I picked my answers with the air mouse’s arrow keys — never got up once.

3. What the AI remote control of the future looks like

While the research ran I was also thinking about all the companies building these “AI hardware remotes,” and what would actually be good to use. My read:

• Bluetooth > 2.4G — doesn’t take a USB port
• The fewer buttons the better — arrows and Enter are honestly enough
• Remappable keys — bind one to activate the voice input method
• Built-in noise-cancelling mic — no separate lavalier to carry

Nothing on the market fully qualifies yet. Youlanzi and various 3D-printed DIY builds are trying, but for mouse smoothness this decade-old unit is still the best.

4. The research turned up 7 schools of AI creators

When the research finished, Claude Code laid out a structured report — 7 schools:

1. Experimental long-form explainers — systematic courses on Bilibili, million-follower accounts like Qiuzhi 2046
2. Reviews / industry commentary — Kasike, Cyber Zen Heart
3. The prompt engineering school — Baoyu, Li Jigang, Xiangyang Qiaomu
4. Product managers / one-person companies
5. Jike + WeChat Official Accounts
6. Xiaohongshu / Douyin tutorials
7. AIGC creators — the work goes viral, the person doesn’t

It had originally missed Teacher Bao and Qiuzhi. I gave it one note — “I notice your research is missing some very well-known creators” — and had it fill the gaps and produce a complete report again.

Once it filled them in, it also dug out Teacher Bao’s topic-selection formula:

• Broad audience
• Solves a problem that’s both important and urgent
• Counterintuitive, against conventional wisdom
• Emotion drawn from social insight
• Tightly tracks live trending topics

5. Turning the research into an HTML report

Finally I had it turn the whole research package into an HTML report — a notch better looking than Markdown.

HTML is rich media — you can drop in tables, charts, audio, interactivity, even clickable live samples. Markdown can’t do any of that. In the long-context era, a web page is the better human-machine interface.

Wrapping up

The toolchain is simple:

• A cheap air mouse off Taobao
• Claude Code
• My own voice input method, XNTJ Voice

The best AI remote control isn’t in a new product launch. It’s been sitting on Taobao for ten years.

Source: EP0008_audio.mp3 · ASR model gemini-2.5-pro · full text of the 9-minute-40-second original recording

[00:00] Welcome back to Pinpin’s AI channel. So what I’m sharing today is a little device for using AI. Why am I using this thing? You’ve seen in my other videos that I can already run AI and run my computer entirely by voice. So in that setup I’m often sitting on the couch, or lying in bed, facing the TV, and I can just operate the computer from there. But sometimes there are still a few actions where I need to press a key now and then — like hitting 1, 2, 3, 4, or the arrow keys, to confirm some option in a conversation with the AI.

[00:26] So in that situation I kept thinking, is there a device that lets me remote-control the computer, instead of putting a keyboard and mouse on the bed, because that’s really awkward. And I did actually find it — the almighty Taobao has everything. And the moment I saw this device, it hit me: this is a perfect device for playing with AI. What is it? Honestly this thing has probably been around for over a decade. It’s called an air mouse. It doesn’t just remote-control the mouse — it also maps every single key on a keyboard onto the device.

[00:53] So I bought a bunch of similar products off Taobao and ran a whole series of comparisons, and in the end I went with this one. I’ve also seen a lot of companies building this kind of web coding tool. So today let me show you how I normally use it to drive my computer. As you can see, it’s basically a remote. In the middle there’s the left and right mouse buttons, the scroll wheel, and the mouse control button — and it’s a full keyboard, every key is on there. And it maps to my voice input method too.

[01:20] First, once I press this key, it can directly drive the mouse. Right now — really smoothly — let me show you how I do it. I’m remote-controlling my mouse super smoothly, it moves with my hand motion, and I can land on a button really precisely and then get into whatever project I want. And say I want to activate the voice input method right now — in this window: what do I want to do today.

[01:43] I want to research the AI creators who are doing pretty well on the various video platforms out there — roughly what positioning each of them has, how long their videos usually run, how they pick their topics, including their language style and how they use their opening hooks. Please organize a multi-agent team and run multi-dimensional searches in parallel. I need you to list out these accounts’ names, which platforms they cross-post on, and some analysis reports.

[02:12] See, what I just dictated went straight out. It’s genuinely so convenient. And I’ve been thinking, a lot of companies are building this kind of device now, so what exactly makes one good to use? I’ve given it some thought. First, it definitely has to be Bluetooth — that’s probably better than 2.4G or infrared wireless. Because it saves you a port, right; most devices have a Bluetooth receiver built in, so you don’t have to plug in a 2.4G receiver like this one does, that little thumb-drive-looking dongle.

[02:40] So let’s look. Right now it’s asking where the boundary of “AI creator” sits. AI tools, AI tutorials, news, AIGC creators, or digital-avatar virtual hosts. And in this case it needs me to press up and down, right? And on this thing I can hit up and down really easily — say AI tools and tutorials, I think I need to look at that one, so I hit Enter. Then AIGC creators, I want that, so I hit Enter. Digital-avatar virtual hosts, skip that for now.

[03:05] See, five is for adding extra options — we don’t need any of those, so, next step. For platform scope I’ll pick all the domestic platforms. Nothing else, next. Purpose of the research — see, I’m doing this as an AI creator myself, looking for benchmark accounts to model on. I think that’s the one. Sample size: a curated 8 to 12 top benchmarks. OK, I hit submit. And it starts working. So let’s keep talking.

[03:27] So what I just mentioned was the wireless tech — Bluetooth is probably better than 2.4G. Beyond that, I don’t think you need this many keys. What you actually use is up and down; left and right, some people never touch. Then there’s the Enter key, right, the confirm key. Plus Delete sometimes. But because my voice input method already works so well, I usually don’t go fix any characters — I usually just let it hit Enter and send the moment I stop talking, so in my scenario I don’t even need the Enter key.

[03:52] What other keys, then? Maybe a few customizable ones — like I could bind one to the voice input method, to the key that triggers speech recognition. And at the same time, I think a device like this could integrate a noise-cancelling mic, so I wouldn’t have to carry a separate clip-on mic, right? I could just sit here holding the remote and this end would pick up my voice directly. A small product like that — right now I don’t think anything on the market fully hits the spec.

[04:16] But brands like Youlanzi, and also some DIY 3D-printing electronics makers, are already building products along these lines. I’ve bought a few that are very close, but so far this one is still the smoothest to use. I think the main reason for the experience is that its mouse movement is so silky — sometimes after using it a lot, I feel like it’s smoother for me than reaching for a trackpad or a mouse directly. Right? Plus over here you can hold down the scroll wheel and use it as a scroll wheel, up and down. Super convenient overall.

[04:49] So today we covered one little device like this. Let’s fast-forward and wait for its research results to come out, then take a look at them and see how we should run this account going forward.

[05:01] OK, it’s basically almost done. Task complete, complete, awaiting instructions. Oh, finally done. So there’s been a saying going around lately, that MD — the Markdown format — is about to be replaced by HTML. Because Markdown was only a compromise from back when the context length of large models was pretty small. And for a genuinely good human-machine interface, HTML — the web-page format — is actually the better choice.

[05:26] And Anthropic, plus gurus like Karpathy, now recommend that when we use AI, we use this web-page approach — both for outputting content and for storing it. So let’s have our Claude Code summarize our results.

[05:44] Okay, please take the data you’ve got now, plus the report you summarized, and lay it out for me visually and clearly as an HTML web page file. And I noticed your research results seem to be missing some very famous creators — like Qiuzhi, or Teacher Bao. I don’t know if that’s because of the dimensions I picked, or because you can only find PR pieces on public platforms, so you lost some information. I want you to fill in as much of this as you can and give me a more complete report.

[06:17] OK, so now let’s let it keep filling things in and finally generate a web document to report back to us. So let’s just wait on it a bit longer.

[06:28] OK, it’s done. Let’s take a look at this page. Wow, the content on this page is pretty thorough. The biggest misconception about being an AI creator is that it’s about teaching people how to use AI. Then it groups them into seven schools. School one is the experimental type — explainers, long videos, depth. Look, these creators are mainly on Bilibili, and their follower counts on Bilibili are in the millions. See, these 10-to-20-minute course videos, systematic courses, right — really trying to teach you something. That’s one direction. Like Qiuzhi 2046 — I think Qiuzhi also recently put out a video around an hour long, talking about Claude Code.

[07:03] Reviews and industry commentary — Kasike, right. Cyber Zen Heart. AI Toolbox. For this type, the main income probably comes from brand deals — reviews of new AI products. The prompt-engineering school: Baoyu, everybody in the industry should be pretty familiar with him; he’s a former senior software engineer at Microsoft, and now he does prompt-engineering tutorials, with 600K-plus followers on X. Li Jigang too, and Xiangyang Qiaomu. Then the product-manager and one-person-company types — more of those on Jike and on WeChat public accounts. Tutorial types on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. AIGC creators — with AIGC creators, honestly the work might blow up while the person doesn’t.

[07:43] General explainers: Teacher Bao. OK, topic formulas and opening hooks. Promising a runtime, systematized courses. Super-hard tasks, AI actually pulling them off. Timely breakdowns of hot new models, tracing it back to why it can do what it does. Translating tech articles, top-tier English AI translation. Results first, eye-catching numbers. Monetization paths: courses, companies, products. No bootcamps, but — the clean-lane route, industry authority, not actually monetizing this way at all.

[08:18] This material is genuinely worth a deep read, including the topic formula it summarizes at the end. Broad audience appeal, solving problems that are important and urgent. Against convention, against received wisdom, the emotion of a social insight, riding real-time news closely.

[08:34] Genuinely good stuff. If you want this material, leave a comment and I can send it to you. OK, that’s it for today’s share. See you next episode.