A few years ago, I used Wireshark to sniff and decode the protocol for the Shure MVX2U, a USB/3.5mm adapter for professional microphones. Shure did not have a method for changing adapter settings in Linux or Android, and I didn't have a Windows/Mac computer, so I wrote a CLI client in Python plus an Android app. The CLI tool had a few small bugs, and I could never figure out how to change settings in one endpoint, monitor the audio endpoint in the Python script, and listen in a different app at the same time. This didn't bother me much, because the main goal was for my partner and I to adjust mic gain (auto gain and compression were less-than-ideal) and toggle phantom power from our phones for music and theater projects.

(I've since switched to a heavily modified Zoom F3 with direct-connect Schoeps CMC1 amps in M/S configuration; it's nearly the same dimensions/weight, a drastically lower noise floor, onboard recording, and width-adjustable stereo... Unfortunately, this new setup is also over 10x the cost of an MVX2U + sE8 or NT5.)

I halfheartedly tried a few times to reorganize my Python code structure, merge long-unnoticed PRs, and experiment with new audio/USB/HID modules but never had the free time and motivation to properly rewrite everything and get audio monitoring working. Each rewrite attempt introduced 1 or 2 new Git branches and gave me more to process "the next go 'round". The project never got any simpler!

Enter Humblemonk from GitHub. This developer used Claude against my protocol docs to author a Rust device probe and TUI with audio monitoring and a superset of my features. This application fixes the known bugs, adds new MV devices, and supports Mac/Windows/Linux.

If you need yet another anecdote that AI pair programming is building effective tools, this is my stamp of approval. Trust me, I am no fan of Rust rewrites (the u in uutils stands for "ughhh") yet I was delighted to see a better alternative to the app I wrote, implementing Shure's USB protocol based on my exploratory work and making commercial audio gear available to more users.