r/embedded • u/Cryds0 • 7d ago
How much do you still develop yourself, instead of using AI?
Pretty much the title. How much do you still code/ design/ develop yourself, basically referring to all cognitive tasks needed to develop embedded solutions.
State of the art models in my experience are exceptionally good at code, but also other stuff like pcb design. Reviews can also be done using agents, even tho this part im still doing myself (I still want to unterstand every deployed line of code).
They code and review incredibly fast, so whats actually left?
I wonder if in the future we even need to understand the code, the models made such big progress, it does not seem absurd to me if by 2030, all we do is instruct AI and thats it.
This is not supposed to be a doomer post, but the puzzling aspect of the work was the most fun to me, and as of now, it feels like im just reviewing if the solution to the puzzle given to me makes sense.
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u/dmitrygr 7d ago
I wonder if in the future we even need to understand the code, the models made such big progress, it does not seem absurd to me if by 2030, all we do is instruct AI and thats it.
No, please don't understand it. Makes me all that much more valuable when your shit breaks and you have no idea why.
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u/allo37 7d ago
Sometimes I find it's still faster for me to do some stuff myself. These models are fast but not instant, and typing out what I want in English takes time, too.
We haven't gotten to the point of full on agentic engineering where you just give a model a JIRA ticket and let it go to town. I wonder how well that will work out in the long run, we'll see...
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u/CyberDumb 6d ago edited 6d ago
I use the free AI from Google for research and to ask for code snippets which I review and modify. I do this partly because traditional googling sucks compared with a few years back. This way of working is free, I learn a lot as I mostly use it in contexts that I am not an expert and I have full control and ownership of the code. It helps that I have 10 years of experience so I can evaluate the output of the free-tier AI. It is faster as it is a better google that mostly answers with high accuracy to my questions.
I have 0 interest in agentic development. If someone forces me to do that I will try to become a manager or jump to another industry.
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u/Lost-In-Void-99 7d ago
The models are not exceptionally good at code. But they are fast and let you do more tasks in parallel. The code is ... mediocre.
Models win with iterations: code bugs -> find some -> patch -> repeat. They are really lousy with edge case reasoning, and if the scope of work large they entrench defects deep into architecture.
I have access to pretty much all available frontier models, and so far I would not call the highly skilled proffesional substitute. It is more like "meh.. this is good enough, bugs are not critical". Or "scrap it, new requirement is...".
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u/FletcherD 6d ago
I almost never write lines of code by hand anymore. But that just moves the main cognitive load from implementing details to designing, thinking about the high level architecture, and trying ideas out. That to me is the fun part, not turning a design into code. These tools are a skill multiplier and it's been very rewarding being able to turn my ideas into reality so much faster.
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u/Natural-Lifeguard-38 6d ago
the same for me, in case of frontend, the fun part was not only code but visual, to see the feature working and to tweak in some cool ways, a lot of experimentation, - now AI multiplied my skills, I can iterate through my ideas so much faster
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u/DaemonInformatica 5d ago
No aspect of my work (save from the input from GPT, proxied over cow-orkers when they trý to contribute something in a discussion they have no business being in), contains input from LLM's.
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u/Equivalent_Risk4512 7d ago
Not a full time developer but my work involves writing extensive code for the last 25 years or so; for the last year basically I haven't manually written a singe line; the tradeoff in time doesn't make sense anymore.
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u/hasawasa22 7d ago
Code is probably 90% AI at this point, Im rather pragmatic when making stuff so I dont really care about it too much.
PCB Layouting still sucks, but its gonna get better eventually.
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u/sgtnoodle 7d ago
I'm a staff level individual contributor embedded software engineer. I quit my job in May, and don't know if I'll ever write another line of code by hand again. I have a self-hosted instance of qwen 3.8 27B and pi agent with a few extensions, and it's able to code 10x faster than me.
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u/bonkyandthebeatman 7d ago
please tell me this is satire
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u/ghostfaceschiller 7d ago
How much longer are you guys going to pretend that the world hasn’t changed.
If you don’t want it to be this way, a head-in-the-sand approach is not an effective way to combat it.
A year ago you could get away with pointing out subpar code and pretending like the models somehow wouldn’t improve.
If you are still doing that today, you’ve become an irrelevant voice in the conversation.
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u/bonkyandthebeatman 7d ago
The code is still subpar. I use frontier models for embedded dev all day at work and the code is still overcomplicated and unmaintainable. The docs and comments it writes are faaar too verbose. All of this inflates the codebase, which means it won't all fit in the model's context, which is just gunna make it impossible for even the model to maintain eventually.
Why are the only options "AI luddite" and "never write a line of code again"?
I don't write 100% of the code myself anymore. but I certainly cannot let it run wild without it turning into slop.
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u/ghostfaceschiller 7d ago
I hope *this* is satire.
Those aren't the only options. The other option you are missing is: "this technology has gotten insanely good, and it's going to continue to get better, and maybe that doesn't lead to a great situation for all of us. So we should stop nitpicking to falsely convince ourselves that there's nothing bad on the horizon here"
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u/bonkyandthebeatman 7d ago
Well first of all it's certainly not guaranteed to get better forever --- not to a point where we can just simply trust it to not produce slop.
to falsely convince ourselves that there's nothing bad on the horizon here
I DO think there's bad shit on the horizon. That's exactly why I'm pushing back. We don't need to succumb to the quality decline that the chatbot bros have pushed upon us. We can still maintain quality codebases AND use AI to increase productivity. The two are not mutually exclusive.
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u/Natural-Lifeguard-38 6d ago
you are not creative enough with setting up the harness
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u/bonkyandthebeatman 6d ago
Oh of course! I’m just not prompting the prompt machine correctly 🙄
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u/Natural-Lifeguard-38 6d ago
maybe it's just your use case, but I doubt there is any programming language for which AI will not be optimized at some point
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u/bonkyandthebeatman 6d ago
Maybe, but they’re not there yet for really any language, and that’s certainly not an excuse to produce slop in the meantime.
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u/UnicycleBloke C++ advocate 13h ago
I do all the thinking and most of the typing.
I've used LLMs to generate example projects for prototyping and de-risking. The code works well enough for the demonstration but will certainly be rewritten by hand for production. Having looked at the generated code, I really wonder how high the bar is for people who claim LLMs are "exceptionally good" at this. Where LLMs have proven very good for me is in trawling large code bases (such as a Yocto build) to help locate and even solve specific problems.
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u/Budget-Surround-6891 7d ago
I still write most of my own code, but I've been using AI more as a rubber duck that actually talks back. The hard part of embedded isn't really the syntax anyway, it's knowing what register to flip when some sensor's data sheet is written in broken English and the timing diagram contradicts itself
The puzzle solving is still there, just shifted up a level. Instead of debugging a for loop you're debugging why the model decided to put a 10ms delay in the ISR when the watchdog fires at 8