[nrabulinski]

I hate how he’s doing the kind of project a ton of people would like to help with, for free and on their own time, yet he’s making an LLM do all the interesting work. He can’t code so he vibecodes the whole frontend. He can’t reverse engineer so he leaves Claude with the uart connection. He doesn’t understand something so he makes an LLM explain it.

With his platform he could easily find a person (or a couple) who could do this work themselves, not only saving him money, but nerdsniping someone into hacking a bike. A win-win for everybody.

[antran22]

Imagine after mowing your own lawn with a petrol-powered lawnmower, you got some shades from the neighbors for "Robbing the kids in the community a chance for some honest labor. If you don't know how to use the gardening shear, ask the kids to do it instead of using the automatic lawnmower. Would be a win-win for everybody".

[nrabulinski]

Except with an automatic lawnmower you’re still doing the work yourself. In the video he literally said he left Claude overnight. He did no reverse engineering and no coding

[antran22]

Now instead of making the comparison with an automatic lawnmower, what would you say if I use your argument when you let a roomba vacuum your room unsupervised instead of asking the neighbor kid to sweep it a broom? This is why it is going to get real philosophical if we want to judge how lazy a person is based on the level of delegation he put on a tool.

The guy is not a software/embedded engineer. He's a bike engineer. He doesn't want to code more than needed to get his idea working. As for reverse engineering, he did plenty of it. He soldered the serial interface into the board, fired up a serial terminal, watch the output & note down the data sent through the wire for each event on the bike. Two things he used LLM for: - Work through the decompiled app & find the commands for controlling the bike - Write an app to run on the CYD.

What would be the things he would have needed to do face if he had somebody work on this project instead of Claude: - Find somebody in his close vicinity, and have him over the workshop everyday, because this project requires access to the hardware. - If he instead found somebody else with another Revo bike, they would have to collaborate really closely & replicate what each other have found to the other person's setup. All that for a vanity, 1-person project?

[molybd3num]

this is berm peak though, coding was never going to be the focus of the video

[alistairSH]

Throwing shade at somebody for doing a project with the tools they had at hand is so weird.

This sort of thing exactly aligned with the promise of AI (and every "automation advancement" since the dawn of time)! It's another layer of abstraction that allows less technical people to do the thing.

[fnands]

I'm pretty sure if he did that someone would complain that he is using people as free labour to increase his youtube revenues.

It's impossible to do anything on the internet without someone in the peanut gallery telling you you are doing something wrong.

[nickserv]

It shows that you don't need to know how to code to succeed in this type of project.

As someone who does know how to code, I find the approach to be great, as it can motivate others to try similar projects.

[globular-toast]

Yep, we're becoming further and further apart by the day.

[atsuzaki]

He used to be a web developer before doing youtube fulltime, so "he can’t code" is a false premise.

[nrabulinski]

This is what he said though. I don’t doubt he could code if he put his mind to it, but in the video he shows the code that’s talking to the bike, displaying stuff, etc, and says it’s all AI generated because it’s outside his area of expertise.

[WarmWash]

Imagine using a high level language with a mountain of libraries to stitch code blocks together with stack overflow glue, rather than write the project in assembly, fully understand what is going on, and get a much lighter and robust application like a True Programmer™.

[nrabulinski]

You’re either making a bad-faith argument on purpose, or on accident. What you’re saying is false equivalence. Leaving Claude overnight is in no universe comparable to getting some code running yourself, even if that code is 5 lines of python, with a bunch of libraries doing all the heavy lifting

[WarmWash]

5 lines of prompt, with agents doing all the heavy lifting.

Just another abstraction layer that makes it easier for everyone.