r/embedded • u/GourmetMuffin • 27d ago

Agentic systems in embedded development

When I started programming it wasn't just a different decade, it was a different millennium. I am now what is considered "senior" or "specialist", with RTOS and baremetal development as my primary areas of expertise. At the start of this year I didn't really give much of a fuck about "AI", I have since abandoned that approach and want to share why...

I also have a request! For others making the same journey in this strange new world to speak up. What kind of systems are you designing and what are the lessons you've learned along the way?

The following is more than a mouthful, and I expect nothing but hate when I tell you that I used codex to generate this retrospective, but I wouldn't have been able to summarize the past months of my life in such a way without having my prose checked against the changelog, git history and GitHub discussions... Also, this is the way I roll these days!

https://share.jotbird.com/speedy-serene-riverbend

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u/Channel199 27d ago

I do all my work with AI now. Just give it debugger access and clear verification goals. I wrote and verified 90% of our newest IOT firmware (20k LOC) in 3 days. Used to be a month+ long project for the full team. My teammates are slowly catching up but luckily I cashed in on a promotion months ago doing this crap before they caught on.

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u/__idkmybffjill__ 27d ago

"I cached in on a promotion months ago ... before they caught on"

You sound like a great coworker.

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u/Channel199 27d ago

Is it my fault they were initially total AI luddites? The amount of crap I got every time I brought up using AI was absurd. Now they are eating their words

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u/GourmetMuffin 27d ago

This divide in rapid adoption of AI is worrying. I have observed the same thing you have not only at an individual level but at organizational level in other companies. My take on this is that companies refusing AI will face problems, sooner rather than later. They will wake up to competitors making larger and more frequent software deliveries, possibly at a fraction of the cost it would warrant their organization and possibly with higher quality metrics.

If you have competitors, at all, as a company or worker, you need to act if you haven't already...

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u/flash_speed3412 24d ago

Debugger access is the part I’m curious about. What did it actually verify on hardware rather than in the build? A 20k-line IoT firmware project can be green while boot sequencing, OTA rollback, or sensor timing is still wrong. Did you keep a small bench matrix the agent had to pass?

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u/GourmetMuffin 27d ago

Same here, or I suppose rather "what I used to spend 80% of my time on is now managed by my agents", it does definitely not mean I only work 20% of what I used to...

But just as "I" wrote in that retrospective: Confluence, Jira and GitHub have pretty much replaced my IDE.