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Comment by estimator7292 | Hacker News Reader

The craft is alive and well in embedded spaces.

When I was growing up as a programmer I observed JavaScript and swore I would never, ever touch webdev. As I got older that list kept growing to include mobile, then Apple, then desktop in general.

I like my little world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work.

And it's not that there isn't any embedded slopware, but the constraints are so much tighter that you can't really get away with the same level of bad code on 1KB ram and 4KB flash that you can on a 32 core desktop CPU with practically infinite resources.

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> world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work.

I hope you track the progress so you're not surprised one day. The research side is way past embedded C and VHDL was of interest a year ago https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670474.3685966 In embedded code, recent LLMs can do just fine with popular architectures. It's down to the spec and test harness whether embedded C works or not. The moat is not that big.

The spec and the test harness - that is all in a nutshell.

I'm not saying LLMs can't write embedded C.

I'm saying that the resources available are really limiting for careless slop. At least on the 8-bit end of the spectrum.

The point is that the constraints demand some amount of care. LLM's are capable of that if you hold their hand and keep them focused, but you the programmer still need to know what you're doing.

I don't think there's a moat at all. I think the size of the problem space and the resources available make it a challenge to do anything too horrendous and have it still "work".

I was responding a more to the crafted part. I see the craft and care as different things that can be done mostly independently (there will be some overlap). For example writing a full spec and tests that run against an emulator and telling LLM to implement the whole project is full care, minimal (coding) craft.

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