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Comment by EarthMephit | Hacker News Reader

I find that LLMs are almost comically bad at projects that have a hardware component like RaspberryPi or Pico, or Ardunio.

I think that its because often the libraries you use are niche or have a a few similar versions, the LLM really commonly hallucinated solutions and would continually suggest that library X did have that capability. I think because often in hardware projects you often hit a point where you can't do something or you need to modify a library, but the LLM tries to be "helpful" and it makes up a solution.

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Based on my own modestly successful forays into that world, I have to imagine one problem the LLMs have in that space is terrible training data. A good three quarters of any search result you search for in that space will be straight-up out-of-date and not work on your system. Then you've got all the tiny variations between dozens of chipsets, and all the confidently wrong people on the internet telling you to do nonsensical things, entire ecosystems that basically poofed out of existence three years ago but are still full of all kinds of juicy search terms and Google juice... if I can hardly paw through this stuff with years of experience and the physical hardware right in front of me to verify claims with, I don't know how an LLM is supposed to paw through all that and produce a valid answer to any question in that space, without its own hardware to fiddle with directly.

You’re making my eye twitch.

The number of projects I’ve done where my notes are the difference between hours of relearning The Way or instant success. Google doesn’t work as some niche issue is blocking the path.

ESP32, Arduino, Home Assistant And various media server things.

They’re also pretty bad at typescript generics. They’re quite good at explaining concepts (like mapped types), but when push comes to shove they generate all sorts of stuff that looks convincing, but doesn’t pass the type checker.

And then you’ll paste in the error, and they’ll just say “ok I see the problem” and output the exact same broken code lol.

I’m guessing the problem is lack of training data. Most TS codebases are mostly just JS with a few types and zod schemas. All of the neat generic stuff happens in libraries or a few utilities

Actually, it's because many of the people writing tutorials and sharing answers about that stuff don't know what the hell they're doing or grasp the fundamentals of how those systems work and so most of the source material the LLM's are trained on is absolute garbage.

Public Arduino, RPi, Pico communities are basically peak cargo cult, with the blind leading the blind through things they don't understand. The noise is vastly louder than the signal.

There's a basically giant chasm between expereinced or professional embedded developers that mostly have no need to ever touch those things or visit their forums, and the confused hobbyists on those forums randomly slapping together code until something sorta works while trying to share their discoveries.

Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.

If you're genuinely interested in embedded development and IoT stuff, and are willing to put in the time to learn, put those platforms away and challenge yourself to at least learn how to directly work with production-track SoC'a from Nordic or ESP or whatever. And buy some books or take some courses instead of relying on forums or LLM's. You'll find yourself rewarded for the effort.

> Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.

It won't because the RPi are all undocumented, closed-source toys.

It would be an interesting experiment to see which chips an LLM is better at helping out with: RPi's with its hallucinatory ecosystem or something like the BeagleY-AI which has thousands of pages of actual TI documentation for its chips.

It would be really nice if the LLMs could cover for this and circumvent where RPi's keep getting used because they were dumped under cost to bootstrap a network effect.

>Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.

I'm not sure they will. There's a kind of evaporative cooling effect where once you get to a certain level of understanding you switch around your tools enough that there's not much point interacting with the community anymore.

Any book or course recommendations for someone who has a senior SWE background but has never touched hardware/embedded systems?

I was just today trying to fix some errors in an old Linux kernel version 3.x.x .dts file for some old hardware, so that I could get a modern kernel to use it. ChatGPT seemed very helpful at first - and I was super impressed. I thought it was giving me great insight into why the old files were now producing errors … except the changes it proposed never actually fixed anything.

Eventually I read some actual documentation and realised it was just spouting very plausible sounding nonsense - and confident at it!

The same thing happened a year or so ago when I tried to get a much older ChatGPT to help me with with USB protocol problems in some microcontroller code. It just hallucinated APIs and protocol features that didn’t actually exist. I really expected more by now - but I now suspect it’ll just never be good at niche tasks (and these two things are not particularly niche compared to some).

Eventually I read some actual documentation...

For the best of both worlds make the LLM first 'read' the documentation, and then ask for help. Make a huge difference in the quality and relevance of the answers you get.

And hope the docs aren't too large. LLMs tend to confabulate more with longer contexts.

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