Comment by peteforde
4 days ago
Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono).
I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was radically expedited by iterating through the entire process with a ChatGPT instance. I would share zoomed photos, grill it about how audio transformers work, got it to patiently explain JFET soft-switching using an inverter until the pattern was forced into my goopy brain.
Through the process of exploring every node of this circuit, I learned about configurable ground lifts, using a diode bridge to extract the desired voltage rail polarity, how to safely handle both TS and TRS cables with a transformer, that transformer outputs are 180 degrees out of phase, how to add a switch that will attenuate 10dB off a signal to switch line/instrument levels.
Eventually I transitioned from sharing PCB photos to implementing my own take on the cascade design in KiCAD, at which point I was copying and pasting chunks of netlist and reasoning about capacitor values with it.
In short, I gave myself a self-directed college-level intensive in about a week and since that's not generally a thing IRL, it's reasonable to conclude that I wouldn't have ever moved this from a "some day" to something I now understand deeply in the past tense without the ability to shamelessly interrogate an LLM at all hours of the day/night, on my schedule.
If you're lazy, perhaps you're just... lazy?
Anyhow, I highly recommend the Surfy Industries Stereomaker. It's amazing at what it does. https://www.surfyindustries.com/stereomaker
This is a phenomenal example of exactly what I am advocating.
Notice you didn't ask the AI to 'just design a stereo pedal for me.' You interrogated it, reasoned about netlists, and forced the concepts into your brain through intense friction. That is pure deep work.
Throughout the reverse engineering process, the LLM and I both were expecting each op-amp stage to use the next ladder value capacitor. We'd talked ourselves into how and why that would make sense.
At the end I was curious enough that I desoldered those five caps and realized that they were all 2.2nF except for the last stage which was 1nF.
I brought that news back to the LLM and we realigned our understanding of how the effect was achieved, ultimately coming to realize that our approach would have created notches at different frequencies instead of just shifting the phase by about 900 degrees.
It was an incredible learning experience. I try hard not to personify LLMs but this really did feel like working side by side with a friend on a problem until it was solved.
IRL, I suspect that most people who would be able to tackle that challenge with me lack both the time and patience to actually do it.
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Its not as simple as just being lazy, our brains are hardwired to take the path of least resistance. I believe someone industrious like you is the exception and not the rule which is why industrious people do well in life and a priased.
I don't believe that you'll find much if any evidence or compelling research to suggest that our species is "hardwired to take the path of least resistance".
I think that you are confusing passive complacency and conflict avoidance with a default state of how we are as a species and society, so far as such a thing exists.
Honestly, I don't think we'd even be here if people defaulted to lazy. The choice to be lazy is a remarkably recent symptom of the late capitalism era. Nobody could be lazy even 100 years ago. It just wasn't a thing.
Your perspective frustrates me because it implicitly abdicates taking responsibility for making good choices, explaining it away as "everyone does it". That is a mythology that you simply do not have to buy into.
No, you touch on the aspects where you're able to use AI as an extension of your skills.
This is completely different than my colleague who isn't a software engineer, and now all of the sudden is creating PRs which I need to review and correct.
I'm a sceptic. I use it to explore the unknowns and go from there.
With as much kindness as I can manage, it doesn't sound like you're exploring very hard.
All of this stuff is remarkably easy to self-verify if you aren't, well, lazy.
Okay, it's been several weeks.
How much of what you did have you retained? Could you do all of, some of, a small fraction of, or none of the work again today if you had to?
My reaction to this question is that it might technically be in good faith, but you're pushing it.
Let's say that LLMs didn't exist, and I learned these same skills in an oddly specific hands-on workshop, or from an oddly specific textbook, or fuck it, let's say that I hired some greybeard pedal designer to just sit beside me and answer all of my stupid questions without judgement for a few weeks at their hourly rate.
Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned or inexplicably woke up this morning, tabula rasa, and realized that I'd forgotten everything I spent a week teaching myself? I honestly don't think that you would.
For the record, I could reimplement any part of the circuit on demand if I needed to. I might be tempted to look at my notes for the JFET switching because it was genuinely hard to keep in my head, but that's more of a confidence thing than a "shit, I forgot how op-amps work" thing.
I've since implemented a variation into a matrix mixer concept that I'm working on, when it detects that a TS cable has been inserted into a TRS jack.
> Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned
Yes, the exact same way I would dubious when someone says they learned much from following a youtube tutorial or participating in a two week workshop or something
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LLMs absolutely let you explore ideas and areas you wouldn't have otherwise...but does your new design actually _work_?
I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.
At some point this existential doubt about your own work and others seems pretty weird.
Go ahead and figure out ways to interrogate on your work with technical means, that's a critical part of the process with an LLM or not.
Thank you.
I think that you're confusing what you're doing with what I'm doing.
What I'm doing is learning the circuit constructs that I need and then putting them to work in real circuits. There's usually a few breadboard steps in the middle, which you could call reinforcement learning.
To me, the telling thing about your question is the implication that I would spend a week learning how to do something and then not test it out. I know that this reply reads as salty, but I'm really struggling to contain my own "wtf" on this end.
Seriously, people that are so determined to prove that LLMs don't work despite how easy it is to test for yourself and see that they clearly do work are the ones that are hallucinating.
This will always happen as long as people are led by their egos. Also they probably aren't autodidacts and don't understand learning for fun.