[okr]

Soldering transistors by hand was a thing too, once. But these days, i am not sure, if people wanna keep up anymore. Many trillions of transistors later. :)

I like this zooming in and zooming out, mentally. At some point i can zoom out another level. I miss coding. While i still code a lot.

[cmiles74]

I think this is a fundamentally different pursuit. The intellectual part was figuring out where the transistors would go, that's the part that took the thinking. Letting a machine do it just let's you test quicker and move onto the next step. Although, of course, if you only solder your transistors by hand once a year you aren't likely to be very good at it. ;-)

People say the same thing about code but there's been a big conflation between "writing code" and "thinking about the problem". Way too often people are trying to get AI to "think about the problem" instead of simply writing the code.

For me, personally, the writing the code part goes pretty quick. I'm not convinced that's my bottleneck.

[bGl2YW5j]

Great point about the conflation. This makes me realise: for me, writing code is often a big part of thinking through the problem. So it’s no wonder that I’ve found LLMs to be least effective when I cede control before having written a little code myself, ie having worked through the problem a bit.

[lucianbr]

There are definitely people who solder transistors by hand still. Though most not for a living. I wonder how the venn diagram looks together with the set of people designing circuits that eventually get built by machines. Maybe not as disjoint as you first imagine.

[kevindamm]

Depending on the scale of the run and innovation of the tech, it's not unusual to see a founder digging into test-run QA issues with a multimeter and soldering iron, or perhaps a serial port and software debugger. But more often in China than the US these days, or China-US partnerships. And the hobbyist Makers and home innovators still solder together one-offs a lot, that's worldwide. Speakerbox builders do a lot of projects with a little soldering.

I dare say there are more individuals who have soldered something today than there were 100 years ago.

[Ekaros]

If you start designing circuits with LLM (can they even do that yet?) Will you ever learn to do it yourself or fix it when it goes wrong and magic smoke comes out after robot made it for you?