7 ms·

Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin

• gus_massa 9mo ago
  Did you recreate the UI only or also the internal circuits? Does it produce a similar distorsion?
  • _o1yi 9mo ago
    I created the UI and the internal circuits but it's a hundred percent DSP. The SST206 is a recreation of the SST282 (in DSP) and he expanded the bandwidth from 7 kHz to 22 kHz, so it doesn't produce distortion but it can get dark like the original. But yeah so the SST206 it's not grungy like the original so it lacks some of the character. It makes up for it in delay time.
• tomhow 9mo ago
  [under-the-rug stub] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988611 for explanation]
  • ndgold 9mo ago
    Instant ROI
  • RiverStone 9mo ago
    Nicely done!!
    • _o1yi 9mo ago
      Thank you!
  • BenjaminHas 9mo ago
    This is really impressive! I love how you combined AI assistance with schematics, patents, and ROMs to recreate it.
    • _o1yi 9mo ago
      Thank you so much. Yeah it's really cool. I also bought myself a copy of Max MSP and I'm recreating it visually so I can tweak all the parameters and really understand what's going on because the AI did all of the theory for me but I have all the numbers. When you tweak the numbers it makes it sound totally different. So yeah I'm excited. This is what I want to do with my life. I want to build electronic music gear. I'm not saying AI is not going to be able to do that one day but I just can't do web programming anymore. I don't know. I've been doing it too long and I just don't like it anymore.
      • chunkmonke99 9mo ago
        Wait you used Claude Code to recreate patents and schematics? Are the schematics for this easily available somewhere? Was Claude just able to one-shot this?
        • _o1yi 9mo ago
          I use Claude more as a learning tool in this context. It's kind of funny actually got the idea because I heard that in China they're basically replacing teachers with AI, where we're trying to get AI out of our school systems in the United States. So I went into it with that mindset instead of trying to have Claude do the whole thing to teach me how to do it so I understand it and I'm still learning, trying to recreate things with Max so I can have a lot more control and really play with it. I'm learning that reverb creation is a real craft. It's not able to one-shot it yet but I'm sure that's coming this year sometime. I did the UI a hundred percent by myself and I went in there and tweaked it and tried to rebuild it and just try to understand how reverb works etc. I also did a lot of the software licensing just because I have experience with that.
          • 9mo ago
  • ushdbz 9mo ago
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  • ushdbz 9mo ago
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  • ushdbz 9mo ago
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  • deaux 9mo ago
    18 days late, but we needed one of those here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290617
• atentaten 9mo ago
  Nice! Which DAW are you using in the video?
  • bjelkeman-again 9mo ago
    Apple Logic
  • 6581 9mo ago
    Looks like Logic Pro.
• drcongo 9mo ago
  Cmajor, for anyone wondering: https://github.com/cmajor-lang/cmajor https://github.com/cmajor-lang/cmajor
  • reactordev 9mo ago
    All I’ve ever known was JUCE. This looks nice! *edit* well duh, it’s the same guy!
    • _o1yi 9mo ago
      It's incredible
• LatencyKills 9mo ago
  This is fantastic. I’m currently building a combustion engine simulator doing exactly what you did. In fact, I found a number of research papers, had Claude implement the included algorithms, and then incorporated them into the project. What I have now is similar to https://youtu.be/nXrEX6j-Mws?si=XdPA48jymWcapQ-8 https://youtu.be/nXrEX6j-Mws?si=XdPA48jymWcapQ-8 but I haven’t implemented a cohesive UI yet.
  • _o1yi 9mo ago
    Right on that's awesome! I think I'm doing more what you did vs. the other way around. Looks like you're pretty established. How long did it take to build your YouTube to what it is? What's that process been like?
• franky47 9mo ago
  I used to do that exact job 10 years ago (without AI, obviously). I figure that career would be very different now. There was something exciting about sleuthing out how those old machines worked: we used a black box approach, sending in test samples, recording the output, and comparing against the digital algorithm’s output. Trial and error, slowly building a sense of what sort of filter or harmonics could bend a waveform one way or another. I feel like some of this is going to be lost to prompting, the same way hand-tool woodworking has been lost to power tools.
  • rmnclmnt 9mo ago
    I wonder if we could then have released the *stressor in a few months then...
    • franky47 9mo ago
      I’d love to see someone try. Though using AI to build the devtools we used for signal analysis would have been helpful.
  • mycall 9mo ago
    It will be the future for sure, software as a tool for everyone. While there is something lost in prompting, people will always seek out first-principles so they can understand what they are commanding and controlling, especially as old machines become new machines with new capabilities not even imaginable before due to the old software complexity wall.
    • _o1yi 9mo ago
      It's exactly as you say: software as a tool for everyone and it's hard for programmers like me to accept that because I've spent so much time, read so many books, and work so hard perfecting my craft. But smart programmers will realize the world doesn't care about any of that at all.
      • mycall 9mo ago
• dubeye 9mo ago
  awesome, in 2025 I made a few apps for my small business that I have spent hours trawling the web looking for, and I have little coding skills. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a different world, reading the scepticism on here about AI. I'm sure there enterprise cases where it doesn't make sense, but for the your everyday business owner it's amazing what can be done. maybe it's a failure of imagination but I can't imagine a world where this doesn't impact enterprise in short order
  • hatefulheart 9mo ago
    With all due respect you are living in a different world. Not in a bad way, it’s just you haven’t experienced what maintenance on a large complicated code base is like.
    • kaffekaka 9mo ago
      Different worlds yes, but they both exist.
      • hatefulheart 9mo ago
        Sure, where one is ignorant of the other. That’s not a pro.
        • kaffekaka 9mo ago
          Small business owners not being aware of maintenance hell in large org codebases, yes, is that a problem? I work for a large org and maintenance hell is my job, so I see both sides I think.
          • hatefulheart 9mo ago
            I’m a small business owner and solo developer on that business. Let’s just say I’d rather know the costs of my choices upfront. I’m sure there is not one small business owner in tech who would turn their nose up at that.
• Blackthorn 9mo ago
  How can you say it's a 100% faithful recreation if you've never programmed DSP before?
  • steveBK123 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • bigfishrunning 9mo ago
      He included "100% faithful" in the prompt!
      • steveBK123 9mo ago
        “You are an elite DSP programmer who never makes mistakes..”
  • huflungdung 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • utopiah 9mo ago
    Indeed, same questions few days ago when somebody shared a "generated" NES emulator. We have to make this answered when sharing otherwise we can't compare.
    • le-mark 9mo ago
      At some point the llm ingested a few open source NES emulators and many articles on their architecture. So i question the llm creativity involved with these types examples. Probably also for dsps.
      • steveBK123 9mo ago
        Right, the amount of hallucinated response data I see at work using any of these leading models is pretty staggering. So anytime I see one of these “AI created a 100% faithful ___” type posts that does not have detailed testing information, I laugh. Without that, this is v0 and only about 5% of the effort.
• KellyCriterion 9mo ago
  Great achievement! Regarding your own titleing: you are now some type of "platform operator/manager" of this agents :-))
• redfloatplane 9mo ago
  I was hoping that the video was a walkthrough of your process - do you think you might share that at some point? > I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for better or worse! Yes, I agree. I think the role of software developer is going to evolve into much more of an administrative, managerial role, dealing more with working with whatever organisation you're in than actually typing code. Honestly I think it probably was always heading in this direction but it's definitely quite a step change. Wrote about it a little incoherently on my blog just this morning: https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/11-2025-the-year-i-didnt-write-any-code/ https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/11-2025-the-year-i-didnt-writ...
  • askonomm 9mo ago
    As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's sustainable in long-term product companies. AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make good better. You need even more engineering disciplines than before to make sure it's the latter and not the former. Even with chaining code quality MCP's and a whole bunch of instructions in AGENTS.md, there's often a need to intervene and course adjust, because AI can either ignore AGENTS.md, or because whatever can pass code quality checks does not always mean the architecture is something that's solid. That being said, I do agree our job is changing from merely writing code, to more of a managerial title, like you've said. But, there's a new limit - your ability to review the output, and you most definitely should review the output if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software.
    • redfloatplane 9mo ago
      Yes, I didn't do a great job of managing my language in that post (I blame flu-brain). In the case where _someone_ is going to be reading the code I output, I do review it and act more as the pilot-not-flying rather than as a passenger. For personal code (as opposed to code for a client), which is the majority of stuff that I've written since Opus 4.5 released, that's not been the case. I'll update the post to reflect the reality, thanks for calling it out. I completely agree with your comment. I think the ability to review code, architecture, abstractions matters more than the actual writing of the code - in fact this has really always been the case, it's just clearer now that everyone has a lackey to do the typing for them.
• utopiah 9mo ago
  I'm not in the domain, even though I did dabble with DAW and tinker with a PGB-1 and its open source firmware, but how far would you say CMajor helped? I feel like solely picking the right tool, being framework, paradigm, etc can make or break a project. Consequently here for me to better understand how special this is I'd appreciate how (especially since I don't see a link to code itself) how does one go to e.g. https://cmajor.dev/docs/GettingStarted#creating-your-first-patch---hello-world https://cmajor.dev/docs/GettingStarted#creating-your-first-p... to a working DSP.
• synthded 9mo ago
  [dead]
• jvanderbot 9mo ago
  On your "Scares the shit out of me" comment. Use AI like a CNC machinist uses a mill. You're still in the loop, but break it into manageable "passes" with testing touchpoints. These touchpoints allow you to understand what's going on. Nothing wrong with letting AI oneshot something, but it's more fun and less ennui to jump in and look around and exercise some control here and there. And, on larger systems, this is basically required. (for now, perhaps). This is how I do it now: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-useage-2025.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-useage-2025.html
  • vardalab 9mo ago
    Exactly this! I am a retired EE just messing around with AI in my homelab datacenter and that has been my approach as well. Amazing force multiplier, I can finally create more or less what I want with sw based on first principles and basic systems engineering approaches by just guiding AI. I have used golang and ansible and terraform and typescript, languages I never had time to learn and now I can create a working tools/solutions to whatever is my need at the moment. Other day my STT subscription app became too laggy so I asked Claude to spin up an endpoint on one of my GPU boxes, create a proxy server, intercept transcript cleanup calls and create traces in langfuse, setup a prompt eval framework, etc. We make a plan, iterate on it, I usually get Codex or Gemini in on the call as well and in a couple of hours I have a good enough solutions for my personal needs. This would have been probably a weekend or more project before. Skepticism here does remind me a bit of when I learned how to use handtools for woodworking. Ultimately it was nice to be able to make mortises by hand with chisel but damn if using festool dominoes is not that much more productive.
• Xmd5a 9mo ago
  Very nice work. I’m curious: what kinds of projects are you guys currently working on that genuinely push you out of your comfort zone? I had a small epiphany a couple of weeks ago while thinking about robot skin design: using conductive 3D-printed structures whose electrical properties change under strain, combined with electrical impulses, a handful of electrodes, a machine-learning model to interpret the measurements, and computational design to optimize the printed geometry. While digging into the literature, I realized that what I was trying to do already has a name: proprioception via electrical impedance tomography. It turns out the field is very active right now. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/robotic-skin https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/robotic-skin That realization led me to build a Bergström–Boyce nonlinear viscoelastic parallel rheological simulator using Taichi. This is far outside my comfort zone. I’m just a regular programmer with no formal background in physics (apart from some past exposure to Newton-Raphson). Interestingly, my main contribution hasn’t been the math. It’s been providing basic, common-sense guidance to my LLM. For example, I had to explicitly tell it which parameters were fixed by experimental data and which ones were meant to be inferred. In another case, the agent assumed that all the red curves in the paper I'm working with referred to the same sample, when they actually correspond to different conducting NinjaFlex specimens under strain. Correcting those kinds of assumptions, rather than fixing equations, was what allowed me to reproduce the results I was seeking. I now have an analytical, physics-grounded model that fits the published data. Mullins effect: modeled. Next up: creep. We’ll see how far this goes. I’ll probably never produce anything publishable, patentable, or industrial-grade. But I might end up building a very cheap (and hopefully not that inaccurate), printable proprioceptive sensor, with a structure optimized so it can be interpreted by much smaller neural networks than those used in the Cambridge paper. If that works, the gesture will have been worth it.
  • brcmthrowaway 9mo ago
    I would put more effort into algotrading to make $$$ for yourself
• newyankee 9mo ago
  A similar approach might actually help build cheap, and decent hearing aids too
• gbraad 9mo ago
  Isn't that like the Ursa Major Stargate 323 Reverb? Greybox audio released code for this about a year ago: https://github.com/greyboxaudio/SG-323 https://github.com/greyboxaudio/SG-323
  • pera 9mo ago
    Thanks for mentioning this project, I have been looking for a good reverb plugin for Linux for a while now and this sounds great.
    • gbraad 9mo ago
      There might be a plugin based on freeverb, which is also a good sounding one. I ohave it as a logue unit, so can't recommend one immediately. At least I know greybox based on actual device comparison, as he owns one and has been doing this for 5 years sans AI.
• agentifysh 9mo ago
  We are all glorified QA testers with software architect title now. Sure we set the structure of what we want but everything else the AI does and most of our time is now spent testing and complaining to the AI. Pretty soon AI will do the QA portion as well. It will generate any piece of software, even games for a cool $200/month from a vendor of choice: Microsoft (OpenAI) or Google Companies will stop paying for SaaS or complex ERP software, they will just generate their own that only the AI knows how to maintain, run, and add features. It's ironic that software developers are the most enthusiastic about automating their jobs out of existence. No union, no laws that interfere with free market forces.
  • Footprint0521 9mo ago
    Maintenance still has cost and will surely exist in some fashion? But if that is going to be the case, I want to be the best of the best at understanding it all so that I’m the first hired and last fired lol
• alexjplant 9mo ago
  Nice! Earlier this week I discovered another enterprising engineer working on a digital sim of the Mesa Mark IIC+ preamp using a discrete component modeling approach [1]. Pretty cool stuff coming out in the digital audio production space these days. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdyOtO5Id0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdyOtO5Id0
  • _o1yi 9mo ago
    Nice. Thank you for this!
• figassis 9mo ago
  I don’t think we were ever supposed to be programmers. A lot of us are scared because they assumed knowing every detail of a system or language and being able to conjure a system with code was the point of your profession. But it was always building things, or, engineering, just with different tools. If we get to the point where we can ask AI to 3d print a spaceship and also build JARVIS into it for navigation, then your job will become something else, like figuring out how to build brain computer interfaces as we get on our way to becoming cyborgs or whatever for FTL journeys. Building interfaces will not be a thing we will do anymore, as UIs will just be conjured on the fly, contextually, by the AI. Our challenge will always be to keep track of all the foundational knowledge so we can rebuild it all if it comes crashing down (AI or some other event tries to end us). You should feel exited about it, and level up to the next thing where you will be needed, which is to build reliable heterogeneous, self healing systems, often without having a contract between them. This will mean you can conjure up an entire tax management system, a financial system, a government management system, quickly and have them all talk to each other so people can just go about their lives. A dam is built, and you immediately have a system that can operate it and all of its equipment. This may give manufacturers freedom to innovate without worrying about breaking things. Just install it and let the AI learn it, tell you if it needs to calibrate the new equipment, or adjust the existing system to better integrate it, take better advantage of it, etc. There is so much to do in that and many other directions (I mean healthcare, etc, why not eat bigpharma’s lunch?) that we should be excited and not afraid. Of course current AI is nowhere near this, and maybe what enables this will be in an entirely different shape, but that we’re all putting effort into getting there instead of worrying about Angular vs React is what I love the most.