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Comment by arwhatever

18 days ago

I’m trying to pivot my career from web/business app dev entirely into embedded, despite the steep learning curve, many new frameworks and tool chains, because I now have a full-time infinitely patient tutor, and I dare say it’s off to a pretty good start so far.

If you want to get into embedded you’d be better suited learning how to use an o-scope, a meter, and asm/c. If you’re using any sort of hardware that isn’t “mainstream” you’ll be pretty bummed at the results from an LLM.

  • If it’s okay with you, I’m going to very intentionally do my initial learning on mainstream hardware before moving on to anything beyond that.

  • Why not both? An LLM as a tutor, for the o-scope, meter, and assembly is pretty good at getting you unstuck. It doesn't have to do everything for you. It can do the parts you're not interested in and you can focus on the parts that are interesting to you.

    • I asked an LLM (google search LLM result) how to install steam on Rocky 9 without flatpak this evening, and it completely fucked it up. The correct answer were 3 dnf commands I found on reddit.

      I don't know if I'd trust an LLM to teach an o-scope.

I got into embedded 10 years ago, there really is something about driving hardware directly that is just so rewarding.

For AI I've been using Cecli which is cli and can actually run the compile step then fix any errors it finds - in addition to using Context7 MCP for syntax.

Not quite 10x yet but productivity has improved for me many times over. It's just how you use the tools available