AI Can Do More Than Build Web Apps: What Hardware Hacking Teaches Us About LLM Capabilities

AI coding assistants, often perceived as tools limited to web development tasks like writing JavaScript, have untapped potential in more complex engineering domains, as demonstrated by an experiment using Google Gemini to build an RF-decoding weather station. The project, which involved integrating inexpensive sensors and an ESP32 microcontroller, highlighted AI's ability to generate working microcontroller code, although it required human intervention for debugging and context maintenance. The experiment underscored AI's strength in conceptual tasks, such as architectural reasoning and evaluating trade-offs, but also revealed its limitations in handling stateful, low-level timing behaviors and the necessity of human oversight to ensure correctness. Ultimately, the experiment illustrated how AI can broaden the scope of what engineers can attempt, transforming AI from a simple code generator into a powerful tool for exploratory engineering, provided it is used in conjunction with human knowledge and judgment.