What they did
Malik wanted to retire a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie and turn a Galaxy Z Fold into a retro handheld, with everything launching from the ES-DE frontend, box art, per-console settings and an FPS counter. Malik connected the phone to a PC and let an AI agent work over ADB. It started with a read-only inventory of installed emulators, versions, storage permissions and where the owner's game backups lived. It updated apps after checking signing certificates and hashes, pulled games and old metadata straight out of the RetroPie SD-card image with debugfs in WSL without mounting it, laid out the ROM folders ES-DE expects, switched the PSP and PS1 emulators, copied shader presets across RetroArch cores and wrote a script to carry over old game lists. Because emulators draw their own UI, it navigated with screenshots and D-pad key events.
How it went
Twenty systems, from NES to PSP, launch from ES-DE and each held full frame rate in the agent's one-game-per-system test (60 FPS, or 50 for the Virtual Boy). The hard parts were plumbing: PPSSPP failed every launch until it was granted folder access through its own picker, N64 hardware renderers showed a black screen on the Adreno GPU so the software renderer was used, and the free scraper quota ran out quickly. The agent also stopped one copy plan that would have left the phone with under 8 GB free. Malik says it turned a weekend of fiddling into an afternoon.
Worth knowing
The post does not name the agent; in Malik's earlier battery post in the same series it was Claude Code. Use only games and BIOS files you dumped yourself. A plain adb install also installs into the work profile and Secure Folder, so pass --user 0. In ES-DE, Android's Back key can quit the app, and game lists should only be edited while ES-DE is closed.