This is my experience as well. Occasionally when using code tools - I do actually feel like a 10x engineer. I’ve got sufficient experience to know what I want and to correct course when needed. And I can dive into the code and help when needed.
It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
Paid political are a problem no matter what, because one shouldn't need half a billion dollar in ad budget before starting a campaign otherwise you end up in an oligarchy real quick.
We would've assumed that the llms are much better at writing working code since it's not random APIs but rather established API patterns which they should be able to one-shot (e.g. Stripe).
Bad error messages are a problem indeed.
We will release another one with retries very soon.
I have enough experience and knowledge to know what not to buy
What kind of experience do you mean here? Do you go by brand name, or specific clues in product images? Because I have a hard time trusting the product descriptions on these massive online marketplaces (Amazon included).
How do you go about designing a PCB with this in mind though? At least in KiCad, the requirement to make nets first and layout last makes it so I basically have to do a draft layout in my head, connect the pins in the circuit diagram and then do the final layout.
Do you have a better workflow for this?
I'd love to have something that I can just feed a list of tags for each pin and have it pick the pins and make the layout in the fewest layers and/or with fewest vias possible (the latter would be amazing for making perfboard prototypes). Something like MCU_PIN1={uart1_tx,gpio_out,gpio_in,gpio_in_pullup...}, J2_PIN1={uart1_tx}, ... and then it just...figures it out and gives me pin table that I can use in the code (like a bunch of #defines).
I will tend to do make the schematic. I’ll use labels for most connections from the mcu to any peripherals.
On the PCB, the most critical thing to my mind, is component placement. I’ll do that before any wiring up and then use that to determine the most sensible GPIO pins to use.
For the routing I’ll modify the pins used to make it easier/simpler.
It’s definitely an iterative process with a lot of back and forth between schematic and PCB.
The nice thing with the flexibility of the GPIOs is that I don’t need to do much upfront design. I’ll just label pins up in the schematic and if needed tear it up and redo.
The real trick in the schematic is not “wiring” all the connections up. Just use labels that are easy to move around.
It’s like having an amazing team of super talented junior/mid-level engineers along with some crazy maverick experts in tap.
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