MDM disabled Find My, so he had Claude build a Bluetooth phone finder

A developer lost their phone inside the office and burned half an hour searching before hitting a wall: their employer’s MDM policy had disabled Find My, cutting off the obvious recovery path. Rather than keep hunting blind, they asked Claude for options and got a workable one — measure the phone’s Bluetooth signal strength and use it as a proximity gauge. Claude generated a small signal-strength ‘meter’ in roughly a minute, and the developer located the phone by walking the floor and watching the reading climb toward the source.

The technical trick is unremarkable on its own; Bluetooth RSSI has long been used for rough indoor proximity, and a hotter/colder meter is a modest piece of code. What the anecdote highlights is the collapsed distance between having a problem and having a purpose-built tool for it. The finder was written on the spot for a one-off need, shared afterward as an open-source repo (github.com/ben-z/findphone), and the whole loop — problem, prompt, working utility — took minutes.

The wider significance is cultural rather than novel security research: as LLM-assisted coding lowers the cost of disposable, single-use tooling, users increasingly route around locked-down device policies by simply building the utility they need. That’s a convenience win for the individual, but it also underlines a friction point for IT teams, whose MDM restrictions can be quietly sidestepped when generating a bespoke workaround is faster than filing a ticket.