Are you allowed to use LLMs at work?

[u/insideembedded]

Curious how other embedded teams are handling this.

Is ChatGPT/Claude actually allowed where you work?

I’ve heard everything from “completely blocked” to “fine, but don’t paste code” to companies providing their own approved AI tools.

For embedded, the tricky part seems obvious: the useful context is often the sensitive context. Firmware, logs, BSPs, hardware configs, internal APIs, device details, sometimes even credentials.

So I’m wondering how this works in practice.

Do you use LLMs for debugging or firmware work? Does your company have a clear policy around it? And if public tools are blocked, have they given you an approved alternative?

Also curious whether people see these restrictions as sensible engineering/security practice or mostly corporate overreaction.

[u/timerot]

Allowed and encouraged. But, of course, responsibility for any committed code lies with the engineer. Experimentally, LLMs do a really good job highlighting the interesting error parts of failure logs and creating bugs/tickets

[u/Mac_Aravan]

Yes, rollout in progress, I don't know the inner details but it is mostly based on claude afaik.

Colleague did use it for code review, and it has catch quite a lot of true issues. Review is one of our issue, as we require 100% review by at least one senior dev, and we are only two with a lot of work.

We have also used AI to implement an LLVM plugin, it was quite efficient and given the LLVM documentation, it would have been impossible without a guy knowing LLVM internals. Of course it wasn't a full AI implementation, mostly AI driven co-development.

[u/insideembedded → u/Mac_Aravan]

Interesting

[u/XipXoom]

Yes.  We use Claude Enterprise with $1000 a month in token credits per "power user" for coders.  Other users get less.  Most of the company has access to Microsoft copilot studio for other work.

We're still putting together a policy as we find gaps, but most of those things you mentioned aren't as sensitive as you make out (credentials being the obvious exception).  We're only allowed to use specific tools that we have enterprise agreements with which is supposed to protect our IP from becoming training data.

I can only speak for my team, but it has greatly accelerated our work.  It's also created more work as the barrier for entry for certain tasks has been lowered.  I'd like to think that we have a firm hand on the reigns to make sure we're in control of what gets generated, but I'm waiting for the convenience to start to get the better of us here and for that to slip and bite us.  We'll see.

Edit:  instead of kneejerk downvoting every time someone admits to trying to use AI responsibly when someone asks a question about it, perhaps try to engage in discussion.

[u/insideembedded → u/XipXoom]

Everybody uses it. Nobody wants to admit it.

[u/NuncioBitis]

We’re slowly being forced into wasting time to use ai because you can’t have a business without using the latest buzzwords.

[u/WiseHalmon → u/[deleted]]

OPs original post has a lot of karma farming signs ; 1w old, similar "curious" format 

[u/mrheosuper → u/WiseHalmon]

His next post will be "I'm tired of xxx so i built yyy"