Summarizer

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.

It might be role-specific. I'm a solutions engineer. A large portion of my time is spent making demos for customers. LLMs have been a game-changer for me, because not only can I spit out _more_ demos, but I can handle more edge cases in demos that people run into. E.g. for example, someone wrote in asking how to use our REST API with Python. I KNOW a common issue people run into is they forget to handle rate limits, but I also know more JavaScript than Python and have limited time, so before I'd write: ``` # NOTE: Make sure to handle the rate limit! This is just an example. See example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example for a js example doing this. ``` Unsurprisingly, more than half of customers would just ignore the comment, forget to handle the rate limit, and then write in a few months later. With Claude, I just write "Create a customer demo in Python that handles rate limits. Use example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example as a reference," and it gets me 95% of the way there. There are probably 100 other small examples like this where I had the "vibe" to know where the customer might trip over, but not the time to plug up all the little documentation example holes myself. Ideally, yes, hiring a full-time person to handle plugging up these holes would be great, but if you're resource constrained paying Anthropic for tokens is a much faster/cheaper solution in the short term.

Maybe it is language specific? Maybe LLMs have a lot of good JavaScript/TypeScript samples for training and it works for those devs (e.g. me). I heard that Scala devs have problems with LLMs writing code too. I am puzzled by good devs not managing to get LLM work for them.

I definitely think it's language specific. My history may deceive me here, but i believe that LLMs are infinitely better at pumping out python scripts than java. Now i have much, much more experience with java than python, so maybe it's just a case of what you don't know.... However, The tools it writes in python just work for me, and i can incrementally improve them and the tools get rationally better and more aligned with what i want. I then ask it to do the same thing in java, and it spends a half hour trying to do the same job and gets caught in some bit of trivia around how to convert html escape characters, for instance, s.replace("<", "<").replace(">", ">").replace("\"").replace("""); as an example and endlessly compiles and fails over and over again, never able to figure out what it has done wrong, nor decides to give up on the minutia and continue with the more important parts.