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Dan and Greg discuss Revise Robotics, where Greg serves as founding engineer building robotic systems that refurbish discarded corporate laptops for donation. The episode opens with a description of how AI vision models allow robots to navigate unfamiliar BIOS screens and unpredictable laptop states dynamically — a capability that wasn't feasible a few years ago. Greg reflects on how LLM-powered vision surprised even him as a "second gift," enabling a kind of general adaptability that previously would have required exhaustively pre-coded state machines.
The conversation digs into Greg's hands-on experience using Claude for hardware projects, most vividly illustrated by an Arduino RPC library he built on a Raspberry Pi in under five minutes — a task he estimates would have taken a full day by hand. Greg draws a sharp distinction between projects where AI delivers near-100x speedup (well-defined problems with existing patterns and a testable harness) versus cases where it gets confidently stuck in loops. His Minivac 601 circuit simulator project becomes the central cautionary example: months of fruitless AI-assisted attempts to simulate relay circuits collapsed once he realized he needed a real physics engine rather than asking the AI to re-derive Kirchhoff's laws from scratch.
A recurring theme is the tension between speed and trust. Greg describes his journey from clicking "yes" to every Claude permission prompt, to briefly trying sandboxing tools like Nono, to ultimately running Claude with dangerously-skip-permissions locally — partly out of pragmatism, partly because he concluded the permission theater wasn't actually catching anything. He shares his "committee of elders" technique, routing important decisions through Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT simultaneously and only proceeding when all three agree. Dan shares his MMI hook tool, which intercepts Claude's bash calls to enforce conventions like always using uv instead of raw Python.
The episode closes with a candid discussion of the emotional and societal costs of this pace. Greg describes a new kind of frustration — distinct from normal debugging — when an AI tool fails after drawing you deep into a rabbit hole. He and Dan also address broader concerns: the acceleration of security vulnerabilities, the environmental cost of GPU compute, and AI-driven job displacement. Both acknowledge they can't stop using these tools even as they see the harms compounding, and end on a cautiously hopeful note about open-source and local models eventually offering more control.
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The podcast about agentic AI, agentic software engineering, and entrepreneurship.
Each episode is a conversation with people building with agentic AI. Join me as I follow the stories, the behind-the-scenes, and the people behind the code.
About your host, Dan Gerlanc:
Dan brings his experience as a 4x founder with 20 years of experience in ML and software to find unique insights on the impact of AI in tech, software engineering, and entrepreneurship.
I'm Dan Gerlanc and welcome to Agents and Engineers, the podcast for engineers building and building with agents. Today I have Greg Sedetsky with us. He is currently the founding engineer at Revise Robotics. Prior to that, he was a fractional CTO with 10X Management for 11 years, where I was also a client. He before that was founder, CTO, and CEO of at least three other startups, including a web mapping startup that was acquired by Apple. During Hurricane Harvey, he created a map that helped rescue 1700 people. And he was awarded by both the US Coast Guard and the Canadian government for that work. Well, welcome Greg. Great to have you on today.
Welcome. Thank you so much.
So to start, I guess tell us a little bit about what you're working on today at Revise Robotics.
Yeah, super fun. Thank you for the intro. Yeah, very kind. I was kinda thinking like, you know what, it's kinda nice to start a day with somebody just listing off and it was like the greatest hits.
Well, you said impressive background, so
No, no, no. You you're very kind. yeah. you have to tell everybody about the bourbon company started. Okay. I haven't started this one. That's a dream.
yeah.
yeah, so yeah, Revise is super, super fun. startup that I joined quite recently here in New York City. The short of it is that there's a ton of laptops that get kind of discarded after they're used in corporate, you know, the corporate world, right? So huge company,
Yep. Yep.
thousands of employees. And those laptops, once they kind of are deemed like not good enough or they're being replaced after a few years, t strangely or I would say shockingly enough, the best thing for them usually ends up in crushing them, like literally just like making little pellets
So wow.
and extracting, you know, like a tiny little bit of gold maybe out of them or silver or whatever, copper,
Yeah. Yep.
and then like basically like mining them, which is this
Yes, it is.
absurd thing because these laptops are perfectly, perfectly still good. So what we do We kind source these laptops and then we use robots to fix them up. I can go into what that entails. basically we make them refurbished. If you've bought a refurbished computer, you know kind of what that is. It's like as good as new. and then and then that's it. And then they're donated right now. So it's very nice. You know, they're donated to people who either can't afford laptops or there's like lots of nonprofits that are like in this space and they're trying to connect people who basically their lives would be change by having a laptop, which you can imagine
Yeah.
not having a laptop and having a laptop, that's a really big difference. we're not talking about like up gr sorry. Yeah, right. It's not it's not
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah.
like, like is this the the latest and no it's not it's like no laptop. like imagine, you know, applying to anything and and reading information. So so it's very, very nice. Yeah. The it's very motivating. Mm-hmm. No. It it can that's right.
Right. It's not like can this run Crysis it's like can I use Chrome to get my email.
Yeah, can I go on a Google form? You know, I I'm even like, you know, telling my girlfriend it's like you know, she was like, we embed a Google form like on a website we're doing. And I was like, you can't like the mobile like like a mobile Google form form is broken enough. Anyway, laptops are good. and yeah, so it's very, very nice. But one of the sort like one of the many twists that are kind of interesting about what we're doing is that there's a big robotic component because this kind of work right now is done by humans who basically stare at a Windows installation screen. and they just stare at that on like multiple laps, which is a crazy insane thing that we are forcing humans to do.
like watching the installation process happen? Okay. Yeah. Yes.
Watching yeah, as interesting as watching grass grow, really. And that's on one side. And then the other side, which is really interesting and kind of like novel and wouldn't have been possible a few years ago, is that we do use AI. But the AI, one of the things that the AI does is that it makes decisions as to what to do next. So it is basically watching the screen with a webcam. And then it's like, okay, like the BIOS menu has this like option that I've never seen, but no problem. Like I know my goal is, you know, to like whatever, wipe the hard drive. And so let me go like arrow down three times, which I've never done. I mean the AI doesn't have these thoughts. But in a sense, we're you know, we're like piggybacking on it's like kind of like the general intelligence of AI, especially with vision models. Which again a few years ago, if you had to write this, you would be like, I can it can only work if this it's the exact same thing, if there's one deviation like Like, you know, obviously you couldn't like let it just figure it out and now you can, so that's a big change. Yep.
Right. Like how many different models would you need to at each step to get to the next step there? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and exactly, and how many states a laptop can be in. And you and we're really talking about, you know, laptops that maybe, you know, the battery is like for just faulty enough that it will boot, but then kind of like mid operation shut down, but the AI can still like figure that out or try another strategies, or sometimes it has to press F four, but like more quickly, and it like will direct the robot to like we have like our video on our website is very like you kind of see the robot like just jam F four and that's what it does. so it's it's it's kind of yeah, it's kind of wild.
So how did had you worked in robotics before this? How did you get into doing this? Okay.
No, but they knew that. Yeah. They knew that before hiring me. I did not hide my non robotic background. I did have a very old GitHub repo where I listed all the robotic arms that one day I wish to have. And this was my claim to like I've been thinking about it for a while, which is completely true.
Okay. All right.
But yeah, all all my like little smart like I have like little art experiments and things that I release on the web. that was definitely always like one day I'll get to and now it's like it's not just one day, it's every day. And it's not just like a little bit like we have four and they can harm us. and of course way less than like others that are like we'll just like rip your body in two if you just pass a negative instead of a positive. Ours are more like yeah, like these arms are
The robotic arms. Okay.
just like it's pretty much like a you know, whatever like you see on a construction site, just You control it with numbers and code that you send it and it's absolut it absolutely doesn't care if it moves left or right, it's just a motor. But the forks and the torques and everything is just like it's it's it it's not funny and in a sense you be yeah, whatever, you become aware of the Yeah. Yeah, very careful, yeah. Which is fun 'cause
Right. You don't you gotta be careful. Yeah.
it adds a little bit of spice to our the the software development world where my god I
Right.
have to, you know, no, I have to reinstall NPM or something. No, this is like you're going to the hospital.
Right. You have you have to make sure it actually doesn't go back to the old way and smash the laptop. Yeah.
Yes, yeah, yeah. I I can i e ev even hurting the laptop in the sense I'm like, you know, it's still much better than hurting one of my colleagues. so we try to get away for that, but knock on wood it hasn't happened, but it there's close calls and then we're like, all right, how do we We try to learn we're try learn from the close calls to our yeah, our our exact our post mortems are hopefully not mortems. Haha. So it's but but that's the spirit, yeah, that's the spirit.
So how mu how much of this has changed in the last year or two years with LLMs, vision models,
Mm-hmm.
or how much can be done now that couldn't be done before? What like what does that transition kind of look like?
Yeah. I'd say yeah, I mean there's two aspects of it. I I think on one hand there's like you know, there's like the company and I junced semi recently, so I I'm also not gonna like opine necessarily what was going on years ago. I think, yeah, from the company's point of view, as I understand kind of its history, specifically vision models, which I have to say, like in a sense that this is a very dumb thing to say, but like I think it's kind of intrigu intriguing that when we got LLMs and we're like, all right, we have this like rock from that you know, flew from another planet and when we plug electrodes into it and it talks back to us and like we love it. I don't know that I would have predicted that they were also gonna like be really good with images. I don't know if everybody was really clear, but in a sense we I kind of feel like we just got another gift out of nowhere. At some point it was like, by the way, they all now work perfectly. It does OCR better than anything. I actually did my mom found like our grandma's like recipe book And they're all like handwritten in Russian. And you know, it was like 50 pages. And I like, I mean, my brain is poisoned now. I go like of c I know exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm not even gonna not do that. I immediately take 15 pictures with my iPhones, write like a six-line script, send it to Clyde, and I'm like, I'm even like it's almost like I'm curious and I'm not curious anymore. I just assume it's gonna work. And it like transcribes Russian handwritten recipes. It does hallucinate a few, like a few fishes, become a different kind of fish.
Sure. Yeah.
so we w we do still like validate them one by one, we read them. But who, how, where? Like when does that so yeah, so the vision models, again, back to the company, that made a huge, huge impact because the robot can see the laptop it's working on and make take decisions. the AI LM component that I think we'll talk about a lot in terms of the coding, I mean, in the sense it's just a multiplicator of speed, right? It's like you can have a smaller team, you can go faster, you can make more projects. I of course used Claude to tell me what Claude projects I had worked on. I counted and I was like, get me for the last three to six months. It was like, actually we only have
Yeah.
history for 30 days. I was like, no. And it's still t
In c in Claude or in GitHub?
No, no, the dot Claude in the dot Claude in my in my like home directory, you know, where it kind of like ho like has like a few like kind of JSON y files. That's right, it's gonna have the session history.
okay. Hm. Yeah, yeah, the s where it has the session history for Claude. Yeah.
So I have like and I know it's sure whatever, like it's not it's not a numbers game, but it is, of course. I have like Twenty-seven projects that I worked in the last three days. And then of course when I read I'm like, yeah, that's a huge one. That's a huge one. That's a huge one. And I'm like, that's of course a completely new, like, you know, I th the one time that I remember working on like 20-ish projects was when I did I did my time so to speak and was at Recurse Center, which is a fantastic place. Huge shout out to Recurse. place in New York that you can also do remotely, but mostly in New York, people come for three months, work on their own project. It's amazing. recurse.com There I there it is. I plugged it. I don't get an affiliate, but at Recurse
I I know lots of folks who've gone there
It's
and
it's it's fantastic. It it's just like yeah, the the best people and the best but when you're there you feel like it's a such sp such a special moment and it kinda gets the best out of you and there I maybe worked on twenty projects at one time. Now I work on twenty projects like all the time. which yeah, it's like that's novel. I don't know what the old number is, but now it's too late, it's out of my mind. anyway, I don't know if that's
And do you think I mean, I like to think that everyone is now using these, but I mean empirically I can't anecdotally I see it right on social media, but
Yeah. Hmm.
also there's still some people who say, Hey, I use this and it's not really doing that much for me. Do you think
Yeah.
there's something that separates developers who get a lot out of working with LLMs versus those who don't.
i yeah, I I it's almost like I can't I almost can't believe that quote unquote people are still saying that because it felt like that's what people were saying six months ago and maybe there was more uncertainty or like they had a better point and now unfortunately their position becomes I think a little bit more untenable. Like we can talk about the harms of AI and I think those are still like in the air and we're probably all like coughing up like bits of plastic because like The AI pollution is gonna like also maybe kill us faster than like whatever. That's still true. I say the following. I I have a little bit of a hard time thinking about this in the sense of like first of all, like who is everyone? Are we talking about developers or like a a a bigger swath of the population? Developers, okay, okay.
Developers, I'd say. Yeah.
Well, okay. But even though you said I was hoping you wouldn't. I'll just say one quick thing that was interesting is that I visited that that many names, but they're very nice people and I love them. But I visited two friends and I would say generally they're definitely they've they've never develop you know s you know said that they were developers or anything like that. but they were always interested in I mean anyone's interested in making having my mom loves making eye images just because you know like she types words and I guess something. So these people were like, I want to make whatever, apps, things. I think what was interesting seeing how they work was that They're very lost as to like like they really wouldn't know how to improve the system. They wouldn't understand what was wrong about any of the decisions. And in one specific case, what I witnessed was well, first of all, the person has like obviously like really great ideas. Like obviously the tools have nothing to do with they have a ton of really good ideas and and thoughts and like they should be empowered. So that's absolutely true.
Yeah, and I think sometimes almost better and sometimes because you're coming at it from what's my problem versus how do I engineer this?
Yes, exactly. Yeah, they did not care. They they cared for the thing to like exist and then hopefully work and then hopefully kind of like be okay.
Yeah.
But they would I think were even very open to the thing like half working because they thought, well if I at least if I get it I can fix it. So the big thing that I saw there that I found really interesting was that they were it really felt like seeing maybe like whatever ourselves or myself like two, three years ago, they were going to claude.ai with Claude like claude.com
Yeah.
They were talking to it and then they would just like accept everything it would say, which which is fine. And but every single operation was them copying something or going somewhere and clicking. So in a s in a funny way, they were the AI's tool. like, you know, in this like MCP relationship, they were the tool and the AI was just like telling them what to do. And then it so all the tales that they would tell me was like like they would show me a thing that was deployed on like six different servers. They of course didn't understand why, how, like they would just they follow yeah, one thing is on Netlify there's a Cloudflare worker, there's an a Why d don't ask why. It did work. It it got like them a weird URL and it was always like, this took me six hours. And I was like, I why did it take you six hours? This is like a fifteen line flask script that does one thing with a web UI. And the reason, of course, is that they were actually the reason why it took six hours. So i in one example, which again I kind of find it it's a more pure example because I wasn't dealing with a developer who was like didn't like the goal language or something, like nothing against go, but just like I was just like Enabling a person and so as as somebody said, I really just built a DIY version of lovable, which is also kind of a funny thing. I should have just maybe given them lovable. But
Yeah. Right.
I did basically be like, okay, go away. I'll write a markdown file that and this is like I think pretty much like really the only rule that I kind of just am annoyed that it still like doesn't use by default. It's like just use UV, don't do virtual environments, which I love, but we've all moved on.
I wrote a tool that actually you use it as a Claude hook and it lets you have rewrites where it will block things like Python three and rewrite it as uv run.
Wait, okay, what's a hook and what's a rerun? I've never heard of those things.
So in Claude basically you can have hooks at various steps. So one can be any time you're running a bash script or running bat the bash tool. And
that's interesting.
so initially I wrote this, it's called MMI or Mother May I.
I saw that. Yes, yes, yes. Okay.
And one of so one of the things it does is it lets you configure your allow list.
Mm-hmm.
in a way by in a more flexible way than Claude code gives you.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
or simpler, like you don't need to understand globbing, things like that.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
You can just be like, hey, allow me to run git and any git subcommands.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
And then the other part I added later was to I had the same problem where I was tired of it running Python or Python 3. And
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
so basically you can
Mm.
it what you what commands you don't want it to run.
Right.
And there's a mode in the hooks where it it communicates it back to Claude or other harnesses have this ability where you send
Mm-hmm.
it a message and say, hey, don't use Python 3, always use "uv run"
Hmm. But can it so so so this is like I don't know if this is what part of my opinions. I sort of like, in a sense, because you see, you know, you fill up the context window, it remembers one thing and then it forgets it, it writes a markdown, found and it reads it back. In a sense, I like almost think it's almost like a waste of time to write any markdown instructions. So to me, I'm interested, I mean, I'm interested and generally I I think people should check it out, and I know you do really good work. I'm not doubting that, but I'm less interested if this is more a markdown. If this is a right. It's like it's like like you remove the Python tool. If you can remove the Python tool
It's not more markdown. Yeah. Yeah.
from its tools, my God, like please. I absolutely want that. but that's definitely one of the like and I think we should talk about permissions because I have in very recently gone to the dark side.
So tell tell me more about the dark side.
I run Claude dangerous
Okay. Do you run it in a sandbox or on a separate host?
Nope. Nope.
Nope, just locally. You're
Yep.
living dangerously.
I have been enabled so the the thing is I got a taste for it in a specific environment. So right. I think the history for me of like my pr my relationship with permissions was that you get the tool and you're like, my god, yes, Claude, to ask me every single question. Yes, you and I were doing
Yeah.
this thing. And then you become, of course, you know, the whatever the Homer Simpson scene years ago where he like had a nuclear plant, he gets to like Woodpecker that just presses the button all the time. You just say yes to everything. I'm not gonna catch when it like base sixty four my SSH key and sends it off to like a malware site. Like it will be in like like there's no like i a a good malware would like write itself in the middle of a file that you can't even see because it shows you the first three lines and it's like I'm not gonna catch it. So I just say yes to everything and then of course two things happen. One, I'm annoyed. Two, it's a waste of time because it waits on me and I'm only saying yes. And three, it's it's actually annoying in the sense of like like you said, like it it's it will ask six variations of the same git call because it changed the name of a branch. I'm like, why? Like d the what's c what there's no security here, right? So so I'm kind of having that in the back of my mind. And then I'm like, I'm sure somebody has has a sandbox thing. And then I re read about like, it uses sandbox, but sometimes it can even b like defeat its own sandbox. You should not use its sandbox. I'm like, all right, so now we're like grading sandboxes. I have to get into sandbox line. Then I learned of Nono. I I did see your tool. I I I didn't get to it first. I got to Nono first, which is also like a sandboxing tool. And then they have a dash dash clawed like preset. I'm like, all right, this is it, Greg. Good job. Like you did your d you're not gonna go crazy. Like you're gonna use a good sandboxing tool. And and then I I don't even really know what I want. Sand well, I yes, I I I guess what I liked about Nono potentially was that it was like it should n No no. It's like N O N O, yeah. So
What is what is this tool? I haven't used it. No no, no. Okay. Okay.
The my the pitch that I really was like into was it will only read write the directory you're in, which also is a little bit what you kind of assume happens when you start Claude and it goes, do you trust this folder? I'm like, yeah, like
Yeah.
okay, like deal Claude, like stay
Right.
in this like in the sense I accepted that when I installed Claude Code, like whatever, a year ago or whatever.
Yeah.
But already knowing that's not really the case, because it can go, it can also peek in your downloads folder, it can also do this, and then you say yes, and then you're like, So
Red, yeah.
the first was kinda bullshit. So So no no is like, no, we will only that fuller. I'm like, that seems like a good deal. And then in terms of networking, which again, like, really what I don't want to happen is two things deleting files on my computer and extracting my SSH keys, right? Which should be encrypted, by the way, which is a whole other conversation. And maybe like installing a keyboard logger, I guess. So, you know
Yeah. Like deleting writing all zeros to your hard drive. That kind of stuff. Yeah. All all sorts of fun, yeah.
Yeah, guess yeah, writing zeros, I didn't think of that. Yeah but but like Yeah, but it's it's like will it happen? Anyway, so so then no no promises.
I mean some it would probably be unlikely to happen unless you were doing some task that
But but unless you ride the first LM virus.
yeah, right. I mean if you had something injected into your context that like sure, like you downloaded
Then no problem. Then no pro
a website that then tells it to do this, sure. That's I think the risk. But working on your own project probably not.
like in my right exact. I I I mean it makes mistakes, it does sometimes go like, let me delete this file 'cause it takes up space and then
Yeah, yeah.
I guess if I had clicked yes, yes, yes, yes, and then asked me to do and I would well know, I'd be like, Whew it it's good that we're anyway. So
Yeah.
so I install Nono basically it stops working. Because of course Claude Code is like releasing probably like fifty thousand updates a day And they just changed
Yeah.
one path to one thing. The setting broke, the cookie broke, the login
Yeah.
broke. And I'm like, okay, so now I'm annoyed at a sandboxing tool that was supposed to run the other tool that was supposed to do the thing. And it's just like, how many layers up am I gonna go? So I'm like a little bit like, I think I need to go the other direction. I keep that
Yeah.
in mind. Then I work on a hardware project. And this is one of the kind of things I also want to say today,
Mm-hmm.
is that hardware with Claude is like so fun. the one thing that I did is that
tell me more. Tell me more about that.
Well, right. So so I ha I have a few hardware things that I did.
Okay.
this one, perfect example. This is like this is school textbook, school book, whatever. So my colleagues w have like a lot of Arduinos, they a lot of things. Basically, there's a lot
Mm-hmm.
of like copy pasting, and we have like homegrown libraries. That's all very normal. And I kind of go, Hey, I don't have an Arduino library in the you know, like there's like a the official libraries, whatever, or just like libraries
Yeah.
that you're like kind of like NPM install. I go, let's make a library with this code that we reuse all the time, which basically is like RPC. It's just a way to call in the Arduino, ask it to do a thing, and then the Arduino responds with something. Everybody like rewrites that. We use JSON sue us. That's right. That that's
Yep. The G the G R P C of Arduino.
right. JSON a little bit of JSON never hurt nobody.
Yeah.
It works, it's easy to talk to, serial, nothing crazy. And I'm like, let's let's make a fun library so that it's fun to write on, you know, remove the boilerplate, et cetera. But then I go, Let's actually get a taste. And that was my that was my first hit. That was the free drug. The free opium was that. I get a Raspberry
Well the
Pi. So I'm I'm doing it super responsibly. I get a Raspberry Pi. This is two and a half weeks ago maximum. Maybe three. Maybe three. I c I could go see the root.
So when when was when was this? Okay. Very recent.
extremely recent. This is why I'm like very high right now on this. So
Ha ha.
I get a Raspberry Pi, you know, log into it, install Claude code, connect to my account. There's nothing on the device, so it's great. then I take a real Arduino. I connect it to the Raspberry Pi and then I take some resistors. Then I will admit to it, even though it's a podcast and it will be forever. He teaches me Kirchhoff's laws and then tells me this is an incredible, he's he's amazing. Antonio, I everybody's amazing company, but Antonio, big shout out. He goes, I can't believe you got so far without knowing this. And that was like the funniest thing ever. Because like I've been doing electronics for so long, but I was like still
Yeah.
voltage dividing, really? And he was like, No, no, the the math about this is like 19th century. So He very patiently he's an amazing you know, teacher. very patiently walks me through the resistor stuff.
He what one of the one of the founders of the company or okay. Okay, cool.
And so we so basically I put the right resistors after like an hour. Again, Simpsons and the Simpsons at one point Bart is explaining something to Homer, and then he at the end he's like using puppets and Homer still doesn't get it. That's how it felt.
Ha ha ha.
But I get it, I get it. And so I put the right resistors, and basically what I what it does is that the Arduino forget it LMs, forget anything. If you just ask it what is the voltage at this specific pin, it will always, because of Kirchhoff because of physics, because of everything. It will always say like 2.5 volts. That's just physically what it's gonna do. And then in another pin, it was zero. We put it to ground. So then my prompt on the Raspberry Pi was like, hey, here's a bunch of code. Like I pasted a bunch of like old examples. Here's a bunch of code that we reuse all the time. Write a library. Start by writing a library that like in C C for the Arduino.
Mm-hmm.
Burn it on the Arduino, like send that to the firmware, test it, then
Yeah.
when you're done. Write a Python library that talks to the Arduino library that you just wrote, and also like make a Python wrapper so that we can call it from Python, test it with the same Arduino, and here's the two pins that you can check your work on. And then and that was of course dash dash then she was get permissions. And then I kind of turn to him and go, like let's go have a break, let's go have a beer. This will take thirty to forty-five
Yeah.
minutes. You know, and I'm like, because mentally that's how long it took to just say yes and to switch back. And I think it's like I turn around. I look at him, we maybe talk about one thing. It's five minutes, it's done. And I look back and I was like, what? What what just happened? And then the library is like perfect. It's tested, it added tests, it self-tested itself. And I read it through. I'm like, yeah, this is great. This is great. Obviously, like one line of feedback and it does it immediately. And then I I was really, really hooked. I was really hooked on this, like, huh, like I knew about this, but you know, and of course,
Mm-hmm.
this is like a classic thing. It's like The right combination of like a test harness,
Yeah.
some hard constraints, obviously a problem that was simple. It wasn't trying
Yeah.
to like it it had seen a trillion Arduino examples, a a trillion Python UV rapper serial communication
Yeah.
examples out there. Very much in its comfort zone. Pooped out a library, pooped out two library quite easily. And then of course I said, like to make it an official Arduino library, you have to write this weird manifest. I was like, Can you write a weird manifest? Prrr. Because again, thousands of examples, I look it
Yeah.
over, sounds good, and now I have an Arduino library in the Arduino. And I hope I don't get banned because I admitted that it was made by AI, but I read it. It we use it. Don't come at me, bro.
Well, right, I mean you instru you gave it the parameters and
Yes.
made sure it did what you want it to do, right?
We use it. It it's it's short, it's very readable, and it's beautiful C plus plus, I guess. I
Here.
admittedly don't have the C plus plus skills to like tell you whether it like use the right C out star star. It works. So that got me hooked. And then I again I have like more example of hardware things. Some gone
Yeah. And how long do you think it would have taken you to build this by hand?
I mean, okay, I think it's like a day, right? It's like a day of like I get the C library working, I
Yeah.
write I think even like what would have annoyed me, what I would have been like, what's the good C pattern? Because the library like just to get specific, right? On the Arduino side, what I want is for a person
Yeah.
who uses this library to not have to think about the library. I want them to just declare,
Yeah.
hey, I'm an Arduino that does, I don't know, like we change, you know, the the focus on a camera that it's controlling. So I want to declare set focus and then
Yeah.
you library expose that to the serial port to the JSON. You carry the inputs, you transform the types from text, right? To like like you do the string parsing in C correctly. And so I think it's just a lot of like like what's a good pattern for that? In Python, I can definitely write that a lot faster, like,
Yeah.
you know, make a class and have like, you know, like these attributes and these functions that are like all dynamic. But yeah, in C and C I haven't done it a thousand times. So
Right.
between my like rusty ish, okayish C, but that can still get things wrong, my almost unexistent C, me looking for a pattern, looking around for a library, that would have probably taken like some hours, like three, four hours. Then
Yeah.
the Python would have worked, then I would have tested it, I would have found a weird mistake, I would have like, my god And then you know, like between like uploading to the Arduino it always takes like five minutes and then it's like
Yeah.
i it so yeah, it's a day. Not five
Yeah.
minutes. Not five minutes. There's no world where it would have taken five minutes.
Yeah, s so is what is that like a hundred
Right.
X speed up relative to doing it by hand?
Right. I mean that's that's like like how can you not call that a drug? Like it's literally like
Yeah.
you've walked all your life and someone was like, You want to try a bicycle? And it's like, Yeah, that's especially like
Yeah.
a a bicycle going downhill. Which is also maybe that that that
Right.
could be like a funny thing of like sometimes it's still a bike. It's just the battery's out, it's a s it's a heavy city bike. You're going uphill
Yeah.
and there's you know, and there's like potholes. You still like the bike. You still like the idea of pushing this bike, but maybe like walking would have been less effort. Blah blah blah. Maybe this is a bad analogy. But
So well so that well that that sounds like another scenario. Is like is that like where does that case come up that you found where yeah, that's still easier than doing it by hand, but there's some potholes or it's a city bike that maybe fell in the East River. Yes. Yes.
sunk cost fallacy. The one example where it still did things right, but it was more like when it got things wrong, it like kind of like put us into trouble and stuff, is I've vibe set up the networking at our
Mm.
workplace. And we basically went from like having like a home router that like could have like a few ports. Twell's like, all right, like let's have a switch, let's have a router, let's have, you know, a few access points. You want like DHCP. And I like maybe
Yeah.
this is again kind of like a pattern a little bit like I know just enough to get in trouble and I've done it manually
Yeah.
enough, but wouldn't call myself like a like a real networking expert.
So is this like for everyone's laptops at the office or is this also the hardware? Okay. It's like also all
Yes. For everything. Yeah, for everything.
the machine all all the robots, everything too. Okay.
Everything, right? And it's like when we got the space, there were like Ethernet jacks, but basically the previous tenant had like just cut all the cables. So one thing was hardware, which was
Okay.
really fun, and I've done it before. Some of it was a little bit new, but I got like a punch down tool if anybody has ever done that. Basically you get a bunch of cables. You know it's like those panels with like all the Ethernet jacks. So I punched
Yeah. Yeah.
them one by one. I got the right tools. I tested that was fun. That was like the very Yes.
So you've got a ma so you've got things that are hardwired, you've got Wi Fi and you've got things that need a good network connection. hard wire connection.
Well, right. It's like yeah, and yeah, and it's like exactly, yes, that's that's correct. And we have FIOS and but but it's more like, you know, at the end of the day, you really to speak in networking terms, like you just want like that basic firewall and you kind
Yeah.
of want those wireless access points to kind of work. And there's like some kind of magic when access points like use the same network name, computers and phones will mostly magically
Right.
kind of like transfer blah blah. But I also
Right, so you so you can switch between different access points based on which one is stronger or things like that.
closer, but then like also Macs and other devices will like make their own decisions
Right.
as to when to swap 'cause there's like whatever. So I've used and kinda like MikroTik equipment and maybe I don't
Mm-hmm.
think it's like masochistic, but it is a little bit like more complicated than it should be. And it but it's kind of cheaper and it's it's actually like quite powerful.
Yeah.
It's been very stable. I've I've kind of used it for like many, many years now, like in my home apartments and stuff. And I've I think I've used it at one or two kind of like these like s semi-corporate gigs where I kind of like help out
Yeah.
somebody where I'm like, your Wi Fi's terrible, let me put like a few antennas, blah, blah, blah. But a lot
Mm-hmm.
of it was always like, woof, like if you click enough options,
Ha ha.
like it gets like like I don't know. Like I don't know between
Yeah.
like the bridge on the thing with the like it's it's too much networking for me, even though I think I understand something, but not everything.
Right.
So now, New World, and this is like a even pre-dangerly skip permissions, but th that
Yeah.