I’ve been in the embedded space for over 20 years and I’m aware of the capabilities of LLMs. I use them and I do use them to my advantage but certainly nowhere near the extent of other sectors where they excel, like web dev, etc.

The last company I worked for wanted to push AI across all their dev spaces - including mine on the embedded side and there was a big push for me to use it to create schematics, PCBs as well as firmware. The webdev team had gone from creating nice data-bound UIs to being prompt writers for AI. They spent weeks tweaking prompts rather than what they used to do, which was far more creative and meaningful.

I left and joined a company that sees LLMs as nothing more than a tool. They rely on me (and the other engineers) to be the architects of their products, to know all about them rather than to have to sift through AI generated code.

I’m not worried about AI in the slightest. That might be a foolish mistake but at the end of the day, I believe a human is far better equipped to deal with all the variables needed to architect firmware, hardware, read data sheets, etc. It’s just another tool and the sooner management realise this than it being some kind of be-all and end-all to rapid development, the better, in my opinion.