[mlyle]

I built and debugged an embedded stub loader for Rp2350 to program MRAM and validate hardware status for a satellite. About 2.5 hours of my time, a lot of it while supervising students/doing other things.

This would have been a couple day+ unpleasant task before; possibly more. I had been putting it off because scouring datasheets and register maps and startup behavior is not fun.

It didn’t know how to troubleshoot the startup successfully itself, though. I had to advise it on a debugging strategy with sentinel values to bisect. But then once explained it fixed the defects and succeeded.

LLMs struggle in large codebases and the benefit is much smaller now. But that capability is growing fast, and not everything software developers do is large.