Meet Monako Glass: Chinese startup brings Claude Code and Codex to smart glasses

A Chinese startup has unveiled smart glasses which it claims to be the ‘world’s first wearable Linux computer in glasses form’. The glasses, called Monako Glass, are aimed at developers, researchers, and AI power users, allowing them to run coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex directly from the heads-up display.

Monako Glass creator Candy Yue posted a launch video in a post on X (formerly Twitter), where he said they were built for “VIBE productivity” and AI-assisted software creation.

“In the age of artificial intelligence, building has never been easier,” Yue stated in the video. “I used to grind at the keyboard, but nowadays I just tell the computer what I want and the AI builds it for me.”

“We believe in the future all types of productivity will move to a form factor that’s as small as a regular pair of glasses,” Yue added.

What are Monako Glass?

The new Monako Glass looks just like a regular pair of glasses with a weight of just 48 grams. The Chinese glasses come with the essentials that you’d expect from smart glasses, such as a display, camera, and speakers.

However, the highlight of Monako Glass is a new bone-conduction microphone which sits right on the user’s nose and listens to the vibrations from the nasal bone.

The use of this specialised microphone also means that the Monako Glass gains the ability to distinguish the user’s commands from the noise in their surroundings.

“If you’re at a rave party or a very loud coffee shop, my AI listens to me and only me,” Yue explained.

The glasses also come with a built-in vision engine powered by a 0.5 TOPS NPU. This means that users can raise their hands to navigate menus and interact with apps via gestures. In his launch video, Yue demonstrated raising a hand to summon a menu, tapping to select a music app, and physically adjusting the volume with hand gestures.

Speaking apps into existence

In the launch video, Yue demonstrated how the glasses can be used to conduct AI research, generate presentations, and interact with AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code and Codex.

The company showed in the video how its glasses can be used to create a custom app via a voice prompt. The AI agent immediately gets to work building the app and, once the process is complete, pins the app directly to the glasses’ home screen for future use.

The company calls these “hyper-personalised apps” and says they can be generated for different professions and workflows, including education, research, software development, and gaming.

During the presentation, Yue demonstrated how a student watching a professor write equations on a blackboard asks the AI to create an application capable of converting handwritten mathematical equations into LaTeX.

All of this is possible because the Monako Glass runs on a custom Linux-based operating system called MonoOS, which uses something called a Lua application layer to run apps with a minimal memory footprint, as low as just 200 to 500KB.