Engineering leadership · Innovation · Software · Hardware · AI in the design loop
I build instruments, and write down what the bench actually said.
Instruments, embedded firmware, and the messy middle of working with AI agents on real electronics. Most of what I publish here started as a problem I was tired of solving by hand.
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Going down the rabbit hole with AI
Six hours, forty-seven minutes and 122 prompts on a USB capture path. What pairing with Claude is actually good for is not the first draft — it is the fourth hour.
The memcpy that was a byte loop
A vendor runtime's memcpy measured 10 cycles per byte on a 144 MHz core. Finding that only mattered because I knew the copy did not have to happen on the CPU at all.
Thirty times I said no
Six hours with an AI on firmware. It produced a defensible answer roughly every twenty minutes, and the architecture only arrived because I could name what was wrong with each one.
17 prompts, 53 minutes
I kept the transcript from building the stencil tool. Not one prompt explains what a solder bridge is, or gives a single dimension for a SOT-23.
How AI is enabling the era of personal software
I built an image-processing tool for a field I know nothing about, to serve a market of exactly one. That used to be impossible.
The threshold point in AI-powered coding
Copilot and Cursor always started with optimism and never sustained a predictable outcome. On 13th Feb that changed — and six months later it has held.