[chillingeffect]

Ive done firmware for a long time. Platforms vary considerably and most have surprises. Debugging facilities are limited. Reference examples are sparse and chatgpt hasnt got much info on niche OSes like zephyr, and safertos except some FreeRTOS.

Pieces of code interact more heavily than a linux machine. Testing requires more hand-holding/baby-sitting. Cross-platform architectures don't scale down well. There are many types of comms busses with no/few standard embeddings.

Some teams know how to make it a lot easier. Some CTOs know this, but most find out the hard way. Embedded practices lag webdev by 5-10 or more years bc they were good enough for a long time or for small projects. Expectations are rising, but there is less leverage than adtech so salaries are ok but not explosive.

[jsjohnst]

> Reference examples are sparse and chatgpt hasnt got much info

Chicken, meet egg. If a web crawler can’t find plenty of reference examples, then LLMs trained on web crawled data aren’t going to be very useful.