@levelsio Adds Radio to His Alexa Jukebox and Shares the Prompt

Rinse FM, Bassdrive and BBC World Service now play on his Echo; the full build prompt is public.

“Everything is hackable now.”

This morning @levelsio built a private Alexa skill, the Jukebox, to play his own MP3s. Since then he has hacked his Amazon Alexa to play internet radio too: his own station @pieter, plus Rinse FM and Bassdrive, and news radio like BBC World Service and Bloomberg.

“It’s insane that this works, my Alexa just became 1000x more useful,” he writes. “It never let me do this by default.”

His case for it: “What a great time to live and hack on every hardware you own, and now you actually own it and can customize it to your own desires. That’s what I mean when I say it’s the era of personal software.”

The prompt, in full, for anyone with an Echo.

He then posted the prompt he gave Claude Code, titled Jukebox for Alexa. It asks for a private Alexa skill that plays your own music from a cloud bucket, plus internet radio. The agent should do as much as possible itself with CLIs and APIs, and only ask for things a person must do: logging in, clicking Allow, testing on the Echo.

Part	Spec
Skill	Alexa-hosted Node.js custom skill, invocation name “jukebox”, AudioPlayer enabled
Music	MP3s in an AWS S3 or Cloudflare R2 bucket under music/, one folder per genre, playlist or album
Library	List the bucket, match spoken names loosely, cache for 5 minutes
Playback	Presigned HTTPS URLs valid at least 12 hours; queue kept in the AudioPlayer token, no database
Radio	HTTPS streams only, each tested with curl; Rinse FM, NTS, Bassdrive and others, plus BBC World Service and NPR
Logging	One line per request so problems show up in CloudWatch
Deploy	ASK CLI and git push, without the web console

Summarized from the prompt @levelsio posted.

When it works, the prompt asks Claude Code to explain Alexa app routines, so that “Alexa, coffee jazz” starts the skill directly.

Five minutes, and one cancelled subscription.

A reply pointed out this was possible 4 years ago via an Alexa skill. “4 years ago I wouldn’t have put the effort to code this up, now it takes me 5 minutes,” @levelsio answered. Asked how he will discover new music without Spotify, he wrote: “That too is super easy with Claude.”

This morning he said he could cancel Spotify. Replying to his own Jukebox post, he later wrote: “Cancelled.”

@levelsio Adds Radio to His Alexa Jukebox and Shares the Prompt

Sources