Comment by viraptor

1 day ago

> 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.

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viraptor

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estimator7292  1 day ago

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".

  • viraptor  1 day ago

    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.