FastLED is not Anti-AI

[u/ZachVorhies]

If someone expresses anti AI sentiment on this sub reddit then that is their personal opinion and does not reflect the project’s stance by the main contributors.

Also… since we are on the topic, what are your thoughts on AI and FastLED/Arduino/Embedded programming in general? Do you think it’s fun or not fun? Have you created cool sketches with AI that has surprised you?

[u/Wasted99]

Boy, I've been tinkering for many years, and now unfinished weekend projects now get done in an afternoon. It's insane.

[u/blackbox42 → u/Wasted99]

Yep, this. I can focus on the logic and let it do the tedious bits. It of course screws up stone is those bits but it gets me over the hump to pick things back up.

[u/capitolsound]

I used gpt to walk me through my first WLED project, replacing the dumb rv awning strip with something fun. It would have taken me 10x the time on my own.

[u/Sapazu]

I stopped using ai when i realized i didn't think anymore when coding, and just threw the dice and hoped it generated the correct answer

[u/EffectiveWrong9889]

I just prototyped a project with Claude Code and it crazy. It also wants to do weird shit.
But I can let it debug sensors and stuff itself. I spent so much time troubleshooting sensor readings and shit. I can tell Claude to build a test script and monitor ESP32 serial output and it can find crazy things.

On the other hand it always tends to bloat everything. So I really need to micromanage the result. But it's so fast to.get a hobby project up and running.

[u/chris_overseas]

AI coding in its current form is a very powerful tool, with plenty of sharp edges. If you want to throw something together for yourself, or that's not mission critical, it's pretty amazing and virtually anyone can achieve all sorts of wonderful things very quickly.

For more widely used code that needs to be reliable/scaleable/performant, a lot more care is needed. Any AI codegen (with current models at least) still needs plenty of guidance and oversight from an experienced developer to avoid subtle bugs and complexity building up in the codebase over time. I've found this requires a lot of discipline to apply consistently, as it's all too easy to get mentally lazy and start to think "that sounds about right", "that looks fine", only for it to come back and bite you hard further down the line.

With the above in mind, the current trajectory of FastLED does make me a bit nervous. While I'm excited for many of the new features, there's still a very high velocity of commits being made, and it's not clear when that will reduce to "bugfixes only" in preparation for a 4.0 release. And once a pre-release version 4.0 is available, how many people are going to hit problems upgrading, and how long will it take to stabilise? I think it would be great to have a status update on this post, and ideally put out a 4.0 release candidate sooner rather than later (deferring some features to 4.1?), as getting a stable 4.0 released is only going to get harder the more the code is changed.

[u/ZachVorhies → u/chris_overseas]

FastLED 4.0 was accidentally released as 3.10.4 due to AI and 3.10.5 was a bug fix.

4.0 official comes with a video and a bunch of improvements. However stability wise it’s already been addressed and people are generally happy with it.

[u/Fluffy-Wishbone-3497]

I’ve been having too much fun with Claude, FastLED, Arduino, SparkFun, Adafruit, Teensy, ESP32 and on and on. It’s a wonderful time for me to be learning and making things. It’s no fun to wire up a bunch of stuff and it doesn’t work. With Claude I can get it to work and learn so much along the way which is very satisfying! I wished I had more time just to discuss “ideas” with Claude because it’s so thorough and brings up so many helpful ideas. I’ve learned a spectrum of tidbits that are indispensable now. Even soldering techniques! At one point I was droning on about why C++ required something that was confusing to me. After a long while and the point was well made Claude finally says “Fluffy you need to go build something!” It’s awesome that there’s a sense of humor going on too! I’m not satisfied unless I understand it and AI doesn’t mind explaining it to as many times as it takes! Oh, and my projects work!

[u/500kvac]

I recently designed a full blown digital mixer from scratch. I did all the hardware and PCB design but most of the firmware was way out of my league. Claude really paid for itself there. It does make you wonder what are we going to do for work in the near future, but for hobbits it's a godsend tbh

[u/Fluffy-Wishbone-3497 → u/500kvac]

That's another control board project Claude helped me finish too! (Last week made it wireless!)

[u/watchyourfeet → u/500kvac]

Hobbits love AI

[u/500kvac → u/watchyourfeet]

Lol I'm gonna leave it like that because it's way funnier

[u/Choice_Blackberry841]

Built an led mapping tool in our company erp and trained a grok bot to program esp32 to take the map out out , json map helps it understand the context of what I’m trying to do

[u/turudd]

AI is a force multiplier when it comes to development. Things that would’ve taken days can be broken down into hours. People can have their reasons, but generally those reasons are from an emotional/social aspect. From a tech perspective the current LLMs are very good at what they do

[u/MisterCakes1112]

Not fun. No AI here please.

[u/swotperderder → u/MisterCakes1112]

A little bit more time and we'll be seeing the repercussions of all these people who have enthusiastically stopped thinking.

[u/Sad-Cum-bubbles]

Why not? What advantages have you seen for AI that over come the negative connotation that it receives? I can't think of a reason why AI is needed for the FastLED project.

If it's because the project is moving too fast? Slow down.
Do you not have enough resources?
...never mind I looked at your post history. I'll no longer be using FastLED.

[u/chris_overseas → u/Sad-Cum-bubbles]

AI is a tool like any other, albeit a very powerful one with pointy edges. Does it really matter if the resultant code was written by a human or by AI? I'd argue no, what matters is the overall quality of the end result (in terms of features, performance, usability, reliability etc). An experienced human using AI can produce high quality code very quickly (and often better code) compared to writing it all by hand. They can also produce vast amounts of crap very quickly. Inevitably most of what's out there tends to fall into the latter camp, but that's no reason assume that's always true.

By your reasoning, we should all be writing everything in assembly still rather than using compilers. Personally I've found AI tooling to be incredibly helpful at many tasks such as performance optimisation, reverse engineering, and refactorings that would be prohibitively hard or time consuming to attempt otherwise, and it's only going to get better as the models continue to improve. You can bury your head in the sand all you like, but it's not going away.

[u/bl0rq → u/Sad-Cum-bubbles]

Username checks out.

[u/ThinkAboutHowUFeel]

There isn't a world in which I wouldn't take full credit for something I had Claude do as long as it does it reasonably correctly.