[sdiy] AI code generation

Thu Jul 23 19:08:34 CEST 2026

I was at some point explaining how LLMs work to someone and explaining
how they can become very misinformed and confidently wrong, and he
summed it up "So if everyone on the internet said that trees are made
out of metal, AIs would believe it?"

I think this is a metal trees situation

On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 6:13 PM Chris McDowell <declareupdate at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Agreed completely, Benjamin. Claude is often wrong -and- overconfident (about hardware), much like hobbyists on reddit and stack overflow. reinforcement learning or outright training based on simulation is a super interesting idea.
>
> > On Jul 23, 2026, at 10:56 AM, Benjamin Tremblay <btremblay at me.com> wrote:
> >
> > Honestly a lot of the electronics discussions around anything involving perceived quality or esthetics is weak. The agent takes on the persona of an experienced hobbyist or greybeard EE and mostly weaves a narrative based on lore found online especially in forum posts. It’s arguably no better than an old school google search, but possibly worse due to excessive confidence.
> > I would prefer ML models trained on electronics simulations.
> >
> > Benjamin Tremblay
> >
> >> On Jul 23, 2026, at 11:50 AM, Chris McDowell via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> 
> >>>
> >>> Has anyone had success using AI for analog electronics? Power
> >>
> >> Not yet! Claude is incredible with code and confidently says very dumb things about hardware. I -have- had it help me tremendously with debugging some hardware, asking the box to think outside the box with mixed results including successes. But I've also had it suggest very silly things, or keep trying to push the conversation toward an obvious non-issue. Since there's not a ton of conversation online about all of our tacit knowledge around electronics, AI doesn't really have a model of it, which makes sense. I look at a high-pass circuit section that ought to be biased to mid-rail, clipping at ground, and realize immediately what's wrong. Claude (who has access to ADC buffers on the MCU, which is very cool) was very creative in his wrong interpretations of the situation.
> >>
> >> On the other hand, my non-electronics friends, the barista next door, my wife, etc all will not talk to me at length about sticky issues. Claude will, and turning a bunch of thoughts into back and forth written language really does help me figure out said stickiness.
> >>
> >> Side note: AI can help with math things I otherwise wouldn't know how to do or wouldn't want to do. "Big annoying interactive spreadsheet, please" does generally work out, so long as I know enough to tell if it's wrong lol.
> >>
> >> Chris McDowell
> >>
> >>> On Jul 23, 2026, at 9:50 AM, cheater cheater via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Has anyone had success using AI for analog electronics? Power
> >>> supplies, filters, equalizers, phase networks, etc?
> >>>
> >>> Thanks
> >>>
> >>>> On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 3:42 PM rrsounds via Synth-diy
> >>>> <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> I used ChatGPT/Codex to build an audio app on my Mac using JUCE. Got more than halfway through, going great, and it went stupid on me. Repeating things forever, taking literally hours for the simplest things, and essentially acting like a recalcitrant two-year old. So I opened another instance of Codex, and told it what was going on. It wasn’t long before it suggested that I move my project to Claude/Code (?). Claude took nearly 7,000 lines and condensed it to less than 6,000, and started from there. It’s nearly done now, and aside from having a bit of a tug-o-war with GUI issues, the audio code is near flawless. I have no idea whether it’s written properly or not, but it meets my spec, doesn’t hog CPU or frame rate, and that’s good enough for me.
> >>>>
> >>>> When I asked Codex why it recommended a competitor, it told me that it wanted me to get my work done.
> >>>>
> >>>> David Reaves
> >>>> David Reaves Audio
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Jul 23, 2026, at 10:58 AM, Sarah Thompson via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> It’s a slot machine. Occasionally it generates gold. Often it generates something painful, or that looks like gold until it wastes your afternoon. I get it. I’m still writing my own code. What AI is doing for me is replacing some of the web searching I used to do, particularly now that Google seems to have heavily nerfed their search, and for cases where documentation is missing or of poor quality. But in the latter case the hallucinations are maddening. I miss having Google actually work properly as a search engine.
> >>>>
> >>>> [s]
> >>>>
> >>>> On Fri, 24 Apr 2026 at 17:51, Ben Stuyts via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Hi all,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> We’re drifting too much off-topic for this list now. The original question was about AI coding for synth/dsp. That was fine in my opinion. But we’re now way beyond that and I suggest we leave it at that.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Ben
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> ________________________________________________________
> >>>>> This is the Synth-diy mailing list
> >>>>> Submit email to: Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> >>>>> View archive at: https://synth-diy.org/pipermail/synth-diy/
> >>>>> Check your settings at: https://synth-diy.org/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
> >>>>> Selling or trading? Use marketplace at synth-diy.org
> >>>>
> >>>> ________________________________________________________
> >>>> This is the Synth-diy mailing list
> >>>> Submit email to: Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> >>>> View archive at: https://synth-diy.org/pipermail/synth-diy/
> >>>> Check your settings at: https://synth-diy.org/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
> >>>> Selling or trading? Use marketplace at synth-diy.org
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> ________________________________________________________
> >>>> This is the Synth-diy mailing list
> >>>> Submit email to: Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> >>>> View archive at: https://synth-diy.org/pipermail/synth-diy/
> >>>> Check your settings at: https://synth-diy.org/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
> >>>> Selling or trading? Use marketplace at synth-diy.org
> >>>
> >>> ________________________________________________________
> >>> This is the Synth-diy mailing list
> >>> Submit email to: Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> >>> View archive at: https://synth-diy.org/pipermail/synth-diy/
> >>> Check your settings at: https://synth-diy.org/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
> >>> Selling or trading? Use marketplace at synth-diy.org
> >>
> >>
> >> ________________________________________________________
> >> This is the Synth-diy mailing list
> >> Submit email to: Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> >> View archive at: https://synth-diy.org/pipermail/synth-diy/
> >> Check your settings at: https://synth-diy.org/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
> >> Selling or trading? Use marketplace at synth-diy.org
>