3 ms·

> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low

by oytis 5mo ago

> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon

traderj0e 5mo ago
Any typical web backend or frontend kind of thing. So like, not systems code.
birdsongs 5mo ago
Mine, easily. Senior (near staff) level embedded engineering. It will spin up a boilerplate uboot or BSP config no problem. I still go in and manually check and add peripherals, but opus 4.7 is terrifyingly smart. Need to modify or add a new peripheral, it's there no problem. Or in a bare metal project, I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature (set up the ADC on pins 4 and 7, ask me for parameters) and it's just done. I do in a day what would probably take me 2. It doesn't help me with reviewing others' work, or planning (I maintain that these are manual tasks). So yeah, I agree with the 40-60%. The parts of my job it helps, it really helps.
- consp 5mo ago
  > I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature My experience is it will attempt read from the wrong memory block resulting in garbadge. But that's a while ago so maybe LLMs have gotten better.
  - HDThoreaun 5mo ago
    The AI labs have all released at least 3 new models each since december, things move very quickly.
    - shimman 5mo ago
      Yeah, the industry has no issues selling $5 bills for $1. Why is this a good thing for society again? That the public subsidizes VC to no shared gains?
    - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
      I've been hearing "the new model is so much better than the one from 6 months ago" every few months since 2023. It's never been true to date, so please understand why I am skeptical that it suddenly became true this time.
- ua709 5mo ago
  > STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature I'm confused, isn't the whole point of using the STM32CubeIDE that all the peripherals, like say setting up an ADC on pins 4 and 7, are checkbox features? https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/wiki/Getting_started_with_ADC https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/wiki/Getting_started_with_ADC
  - birdsongs 5mo ago
    Yes but it's famously clunky, and if I'm already in an existing repo, a prompt will do it much, much faster. It also generates a ton of bloat and comments.
- 05 5mo ago
  Yeah just had Codex/Gemini write me nrf52 bootloader that fit in under 4k flash sector size with OTA and DFU support (well, app does OTA download then the bootloader validates and decompresses the image). Works best if you let them use OpenOCD on a real device, then they can iterate until it starts working. I didn't even need that bootloader, just didn't like the fact that Adafruit one takes too much space :)
jjice 5mo ago
I work on an ETL platform and it definitely is a huge boost in certain things, but a drain in others. We started working on a new product a few months ago and it's really dangerous up front on an empty code base. It can quickly write more code than you can comfortably understand. The more serious danger is when three people are all doing that at once. I had to bring this up at meetings and try to get a better review culture going. Now that we're a few months in and changes are more targeted additions to an existing system we're happy with, it's _huge_ (which has been my experience on our existing product). I can drop a brief paragraph I speech-to-texted into my agent, give it a general starting place (where I imagine the issue/feature extension point is), and then tell it to do some research and propose a change. I'd guess it's about 50% of the time that I have to update it's implementation plan. Then I let it run (my favorite is setting this up before a meeting) and come back. Then we have to review the code and go from there. Definitely a 50%+ speed up in some cases, but not all. It's also great for problems that procrastinating, as it reduces friction so much.

by oytis 5mo ago

> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon

traderj0e 5mo ago

Any typical web backend or frontend kind of thing. So like, not systems code.

birdsongs 5mo ago

Mine, easily. Senior (near staff) level embedded engineering. It will spin up a boilerplate uboot or BSP config no problem. I still go in and manually check and add peripherals, but opus 4.7 is terrifyingly smart. Need to modify or add a new peripheral, it's there no problem. Or in a bare metal project, I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature (set up the ADC on pins 4 and 7, ask me for parameters) and it's just done. I do in a day what would probably take me 2. It doesn't help me with reviewing others' work, or planning (I maintain that these are manual tasks). So yeah, I agree with the 40-60%. The parts of my job it helps, it really helps.

consp 5mo ago
> I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature My experience is it will attempt read from the wrong memory block resulting in garbadge. But that's a while ago so maybe LLMs have gotten better.
- HDThoreaun 5mo ago
  The AI labs have all released at least 3 new models each since december, things move very quickly.
  - shimman 5mo ago
    Yeah, the industry has no issues selling $5 bills for $1. Why is this a good thing for society again? That the public subsidizes VC to no shared gains?
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    I've been hearing "the new model is so much better than the one from 6 months ago" every few months since 2023. It's never been true to date, so please understand why I am skeptical that it suddenly became true this time.
ua709 5mo ago
> STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature I'm confused, isn't the whole point of using the STM32CubeIDE that all the peripherals, like say setting up an ADC on pins 4 and 7, are checkbox features? https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/wiki/Getting_started_with_ADC https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/wiki/Getting_started_with_ADC
- birdsongs 5mo ago
  Yes but it's famously clunky, and if I'm already in an existing repo, a prompt will do it much, much faster. It also generates a ton of bloat and comments.
05 5mo ago
Yeah just had Codex/Gemini write me nrf52 bootloader that fit in under 4k flash sector size with OTA and DFU support (well, app does OTA download then the bootloader validates and decompresses the image). Works best if you let them use OpenOCD on a real device, then they can iterate until it starts working. I didn't even need that bootloader, just didn't like the fact that Adafruit one takes too much space :)

jjice 5mo ago

I work on an ETL platform and it definitely is a huge boost in certain things, but a drain in others. We started working on a new product a few months ago and it's really dangerous up front on an empty code base. It can quickly write more code than you can comfortably understand. The more serious danger is when three people are all doing that at once. I had to bring this up at meetings and try to get a better review culture going. Now that we're a few months in and changes are more targeted additions to an existing system we're happy with, it's _huge_ (which has been my experience on our existing product). I can drop a brief paragraph I speech-to-texted into my agent, give it a general starting place (where I imagine the issue/feature extension point is), and then tell it to do some research and propose a change. I'd guess it's about 50% of the time that I have to update it's implementation plan. Then I let it run (my favorite is setting this up before a meeting) and come back. Then we have to review the code and go from there. Definitely a 50%+ speed up in some cases, but not all. It's also great for problems that procrastinating, as it reduces friction so much.