[sdiy] AI code generation

Thu Apr 23 17:05:54 CEST 2026

It is all pretty amazing, really. 

It has shifted my embedded consulting time in a way that has made a ton more space for music tech and personal projects. I have claude able to run hardware debugging loops all on his own, and we check in later in the day to see what has happened. This is not always possible or appropriate, but when it is it is incredible for me. He's chugging along, using serial handlers he wrote, building, flashing, directly reading and writing memory via openocd, taking pictures with a webcam I set up for him to verify led stuff (seriously). 

And while he's doing that, I can focus on the fun stuff I actually like to code (dsp), work on hardware, draw for fun, and use another instance of claude to help with web deployment things that I've just never been able to dedicate enough time to. Now that he's held my hand through a few projects, I DO have a good idea of how to run services on VPSs and the like, and can actually deliver output in a way that makes sense to the wider world, instead of just "hey guys, I made some sounds you don't understand with tools you don't understand, I hope you like it.". 

Wild times. 

Chris McDowell 

> On Apr 23, 2026, at 8:05 AM, Eric Honour via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> 
> It's done a great job of shifting where one spends time.
> 
> It used to be the case that development of anything nontrivial was iterative - at best, you either build a janky MVP and improve it continually, or spend a year analyzing and designing.
> 
> A metric I think about often is "new project starts".  My day job has me working on a solution with ~20 sub-projects, 12 of which existed when I started working here about a decade ago.  Meaning that, on average, a team of ~10 developers was starting one new project a year.  That's one project-start per person-decade.
> 
> Now, with AI coding tools, I can spin up a proof-of-concept in less than a day.  If someone requests changes at 9am, I can often have an implementation shippable by 5pm.  That implementation may not be correct - but if it's not, that generally gets caught before noon the following day.  That cycle used to take roughly a week (with an additional few weeks of delay for additional verification before code went live).
> 
> And that's at a client who has to worry about security and compliance.  On personal projects where there aren't regulatory pressures, I can basically create one janky app a day, or one polished app in a week.  And I can do that, for better or for worse, without expending real brainpower.
> 
> But that style of development doesn't take care of marketing, or community management, or any of the other things that a "real" company does.  It's like having a Wozniak with no Jobs.
> 
> My interest in synth-diy is amateur rather than professional, so that's "fine".  But I do worry about what it spells for corporate innovation in the longer term (as well as the pipeline problem, as basically nobody seems to be hiring entry-level software developers anymore.)
> 
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 8:48 AM Steve via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org <mailto:synth-diy at synth-diy.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> With the sometimes usable seeming results, the speed certainly seems appealing.
>> 
>> On youtube, there is a German(1) language video called something like "AI burnout ist real", where a computery guy talks about audience e-mails about the topic.
>> How many programmers these days are compelled by managers to use AI, and their jobs devolved into babysitting and fixing "AI slop", which, after some time, gets so mentally taxing that the rate of finding problems gets severely diminished and things are just waved through, and supposedly the overall quality of the code base takes a dive.
>> 
>> (1) I guess auto translate works reasonably well by now, for anyone who cares
>> 
>> - Steve
>> 
>> On 23.04.2026 11:14, Brother Theo via Synth-diy wrote:
>>> Hey everyone,
>>> 
>>> Touchy subject that I need to talk about. I just had Claude AI generate a CSound program for a complex effect. Not only did it hit all the points I gave it, but it even included some stuff I forgot, like a sound source, but also gave me a few ideas on how to operate it. And it took less than 15 minutes to do.
>>> 
>>> I know a lot of you will rebel against the idea of AI. I was one of you. But this experience has opened my eyes to the possibilities. This piece of code would have taken me hours to develop. Claude did it in a fraction of the time. 
>>> 
>>> My buddy got me into this by telling me his experience. He took a code base for a 2007 synth and had Claude make changes and add features. Claude even found bugs and fixed them without prompting. The new code is working and is being tested. 
>>> 
>>> It is a brave new world. Should we feel sorry for the coders?
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Timothy Ressel
>>> 909-423-5962
>>> FutureRetro Synthesizers
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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