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submitted 21 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

A bit weird that we write articles on how ChatGPT did something and it worked (for once). I also had some success with some use cases. Not so much with others. For example it can code JavaScript and write nice boilerplate, example clicker games and some colorful demos. It's not so good at programming Arduino microcontrollers... Granted, patching binaries and BIOS files is a bit of a weird one. I wouldn't have expected it do something useful there.

[-] [email protected] -2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

This tendency for people, particularly in tech, to downplay the successes and up-play the failures of AI will never cease to amaze me. Let's keep pushing those goalposts!

It's such a hard to articulate naivete. Like, yeah if you ask basic-ass in-browser Gemini or Chatgpt to fix your broken Arduino project without giving it proper context to tear through everything, you'll have bad results. No one who is telling you AI is a force to be reckoned with doesn't realize that.

When you set a project up correctly, anyone who knows how AI works is not surprised to see it patch binaries, in BIOS or anywhere else.

Asking it to do something stateful and context heavy (your Arduino project) without proper context is a fools errand.

I digress.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

I'm sorry, I'm currently in the process of setting up the Zed editor, since that one claims to have been designed with AI in mind. But I doubt that will teach electronics to ChatGPT or AIstudio. I already provided it with all the relevant snippets from Espressif's Programming Guide (via the webinterface), so it knows how to access the correct peripherals. I even hand-picked which one to use and discussed with the AI, why that is. Still the resulting code isn't combining it with the other specific requirements I have, but more some straightforward stepper motor example code. But that's not what I want. And I'm not really sure what do do here. Do I need to feed it the hundreds of pages about the silicone as well, and some good books on electronics and microcontroller programming and why and how we use the peripherals on them? (And combining them was the specific task I wanted to use AI for, so I can't feed that in, or I'd do everything myself.)

And what I've also seen it do is bullshit me with the memory allocation. It will sometimes home in on C++ programming. But more how we do it on computers. I specifically instruct it to avoid dynamic allocation, but it's super generous with everything and do it nonetheless. Then I tell it it the data structure is on the heap, and it says sorry and it's going to fix that... Changes around the data structure and it again ends up on the heap. But I can't use it that way for a library. This will work on an ESP32, but not on other microcontrollers. And you can't just be very generous with everything on resource-constrained systems like a microcontroller.

And in the third example I tried to make it do some more involved maths, with the same stepper motors I got from a broken 3D printer. I thought I'd build a robot arm and have AI do the kinematics. And then also the inverse kinematics and use vectors for that. And it's been a while, so likely things have improved a bit since a few months ago. But back then it failed miserably at doing the maths. It could recite the Wikipedia article on what inverse kinematics is. But that was pretty much it. It had zero abilities to apply or understand the maths behind it... It was however capable of coding a nice 3D JavaScript visualization in the browser on how it failed and the angles and positions would look like in that imaginary robot arm. I had to assist a bit and fix several mistakes. But that was something that worked.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to tell me. Prompting these AI tools is a bit hard. And I frequently make mistakes. But I'm willing to learn. It's just that my experience shows it's somewhere between copying code from Stackoverflow like we used to do. And AI has the added benefit of being able to tie it into things and at the same time also write the boiler plate code around it. But I don't think it's super clever. I just see it struggle a lot with any more advanced programming concept, maths, electronics... That doesn't mean it's useless or can't do other (easier) things. But I thought it had ingested some books on programming already and I don't need to teach it for example what dynamic memory allocation is, and why we avoid it at times? But without that knowledge you just can't go far from the usual blink LEDs and beginner examples. And I'm not sure whether the editor or webinterface is at fault here.

Edit: I'm pretty sure just downvoting me won't get a discussion going. We might not share the same perspective, that's why I gave an outline of mine. But are you interested in learning something, or do you just want to push your uninformed opinion?

this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
17 points (84.0% liked)

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