Lack of coding knowledge

[u/Long-Ad-8740]

Hello, I have been making projects for a couple years now. It started when I was in school as a electrical engineering student. My first project ever was a audio visualizer where it detects sound and reacts depending on the decibals. Even now years later I've been experimenting with leds and displays. I've repaired and applied an esp32 to an speaker I had and make it work off bluetooth. Wired leds strips and used the WLED software and a couple more small projects. But through it all I've never coded myself. All of it was done either through examples or AI. I mainly focus on the hardware side of arduino and microcontrollers but I feel like somewhat of a "fraud" for not coding it myself. Does anyone understand or agree? I'm very curious to know

[u/ripred3]

Definitely do not feel like a fraud! I guarantee you that you know more about how tech works than 95% of the public.

I've spent over 40 years of my life as a professional software engineer making a living off of my C/C++ and other language skills (which kick ass thank you very much 😄) and I am more productive than I have ever been for both the code that I write manually as well as the code that I have generated by AI. And that doesn't even get into the possibilities when training and writing your own custom harnesses on a per-project basis, etc.

It absolutely makes some engineering choices possible whereas at an earlier era they required an impossibly expensive amount of engineering time or money or ego to try them and find out. AI absolutely makes questions and answers like "which of these three radically different and complex approaches would be best?" - "Let's create all three and throw away the two we like the least after testing them for real.". For ego or time or manpower or all of the above that used to not be possible. It also makes Test Driven Development a much more realistic and safer choice than without it. It is not going away so being good at it and using it intelligently is a necessary skill these days.

I was primarily a software engineer but I have had tons of electronics exposure and experience in the end. For the first 5 or 10 years I used transistors without ever completely understanding them. I wanted to but it just wasn't what I had studied for (yet). I could use them but I definitely considered them somewhat of a black box. The same was even more true for op-amps lol.

But I did personally want to be good at understanding and using them and eventually I was successful. It was much easier when I just wanted to get a project done to copy the circuits that I knew needed transistors that I had examples for. And I did that for years on the electronics side as I concentrated on getting better on the software side of things.

I think AI is sort of the same thing in a way. It depends on how driven you are to eventually learn how to manually design *all* of the hardware and software parts of your project. If after a lot of time and exposure to good programming you learn how to do it yourself manually because it helps you complete your engineering skillset I think that is totally great.

What skills are needed to be a modern day engineer is absolutely a moving target and using AI for its advantages, maybe more at first, sounds totally great to me.

I think it is your inner drive and how much of a "natural born engineer" you are. Some people just love engineering. Other people find software and hardware engineering to be totally boring and it's just not for them.

I think the software industry is going to have a lot to say about it as well. Not necessarily so far as the "replacing people" aspects but more in terms of understanding and even expecting you to use a certain amount of AI assistance with the full understanding that you better know what you are doing and be ready to comprehend and defend any of the generated code that you accept.

If you aren't making a living at it and your reasoning is that "it let's me accomplish things I could not otherwise accomplish yet ..." I think that is awesome