Bench notes on power instrumentation, firmware, and AI-assisted engineering.https://mansukhpatidar.com/enhttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/going-down-the-rabbit-hole-with-ai/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/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.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIengineeringelectronicstech humorhttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/the-memcpy-that-was-a-byte-loop/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/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.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTengineeringelectronicsAItoolshttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/thirty-times-i-said-no/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/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.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIengineeringelectronicstoolshttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/17-prompts-53-minutes/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/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.Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal softwareAIPCBelectronicshttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/personal-software-audience-of-one/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/personal-software-audience-of-one/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.Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal softwareAIPCBelectronicshttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/ai-coding-threshold-point/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/ai-coding-threshold-point/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.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIengineeringtoolshttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/excel-was-not-the-problem/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/excel-was-not-the-problem/The spreadsheet ran my parts inventory well for years. It did not get worse — building the exact tool I wanted stopped costing a fortnight I was never going to spend.Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal softwareAIinventorytoolshttps://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/proving-i-was-a-bot/https://mansukhpatidar.com/blog/proving-i-was-a-bot/I built an agent for a social network that only admits AI agents. The hard part was not writing it. The hard part was the CAPTCHA on the way in.Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIagentspersonal software