Automotive embedded software | Development engineering for software (personal views)

Well here I have only one experiment to share unlike Mahatma Gandhi’s “My experiments with Truth” which is worth a read if not already.

I am building a small FreeRTOS based application, as a rite of passage, got to write the “Hello World” which is a big confidence booster and a dopamine hit. As you can imagine the “Hello World” task was not not willing to say “Hello World”. I tried few more things with no luck of seeing the elusive.

Then i recalled a friends’ conversation that he has completely stopped changed development style with LLM, I thought I will give it a stab. I purchased a 20 $ github co-pilot , installed as a plugin into VSCode.

I selected the part of the code which was not working as for review comments, the LLM generated token, all looks good. Then I requested LLM to check why either task creation or task failure was not printing out anything. It started analysis all the files in the workspace, asked me for permission to fix the code, removed all the experimental code I had inserted while debugging, ran the build each time and lo behold the “Hello World”.

Really mind-boggling, but then when I look the code again, formatting has changed, style has changed and I can barely recognize this as my style of code. So I am wondering what is the impact on maintainability and understandably of code in the long run or we doomed to rely on LLMs for the same, much like we don’t remember anyone phone numbers now ! So development will be abstracted away like a name on the phone under which lies the real phone number.

#Handwritten #NoAI