Wanted an “exit kiosk” button on Maracaibo’s helm dashboard — the touchscreen runs Chromium in kiosk mode. Claude built a 60-line Python daemon plus a double-tap button. My reaction: overengineering. It’s just a Chrome session — kill it.
Decision. The daemon stays: localhost-only, three endpoints (/exit, /start, /status), no deps, called by the dashboard button.
Because. Two walls make “just kill it” impossible. A webpage can’t close its own browser — kiosk mode ignores window.close(), by design. And our kiosk is wrapped in lwrespawn, so a killed Chromium is back in two seconds — deliberate, a crash at sea must self-heal.
Instead of. The “simple” ssh pi pkill -f 'lwrespawn...' — which kills your own ssh shell (its command line contains the pattern) and the respawn wins. I tried; it didn’t work.
Minimal isn’t zero code — it’s the smallest thing that survives contact with the actual constraints.