The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The world of embedded systems (Interview)
Wed, 15 Jan 2025
Elecia White, host of Embedded.fm and author of Making Embedded Systems, joins us to discuss all things embedded systems. We discuss programming non-computers, open source resources for embedded, self-driving cars, embedded system like the GoPro, Traeger smokers, and even birthday cards. According to Elecia, embedded is going everywhere.
Full Episode
What's up, friends? Welcome back. This is The Change Log. Yes, we feature the hackers, the leaders, and those building embedded systems. Today, we're joined by Alicia White. She runs the awesome podcast Embedded.fm. She's also an embedded software developer. She joins us to discuss...
Programming non-computers, open source resources for Embedded, mentoring in the world of Embedded, self-driving cars, Embedded systems like GoPro, Traeger smokers, and even that musical birthday card you have. According to Alicia, Embedded is going everywhere. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at fly.io.
Fly is the public cloud built for developers like you, like me, developers who ship. And you can learn more and deploy your app in five minutes at fly.io. Okay, let's talk embedded. Well, friends, before the show, I am here with a new friend of mine, Scott Dietzen, CEO of Augment Code. I'm excited about this.
Augment taps into your team's collective knowledge, your code base, your documentation, your dependencies. It is the most context-aware developer AI, so you won't just code faster. You'll also build smarter. It's an ask-me-anything-for-your-code. It's your deep-thinking buddy. It's your Stan Flo antidote. Okay, Scott. So for the foreseeable future, AI-assisted is here to stay.
It's just a matter of getting the AI to be a better assistant. And in particular, I want help on the thinking part, not necessarily the coding part. Can you speak to the thinking problem versus the coding problem and the potential false dichotomy there?
A couple of different points to make. You know, AIs have gotten good at making incremental changes, at least when they understand customer software. So first and the biggest limitation that these AIs have today, They really don't understand anything about your code base.
If you take GitHub Copilot, for example, it's like a fresh college graduate understands some programming languages and algorithms, but doesn't understand what you're trying to do. And as a result of that, something like two thirds of the community on average drops off of the product, especially the expert developers. Augment is different.
We use retrieval augmented generation to deeply mine the knowledge that's inherent inside your code base. So we are a copilot that is an expert and that can help you navigate the code base, help you find issues and fix them and resolve them over time much more quickly than you can trying to tutor up a novice on your software.
So you're often compared to GitHub Copilot. I got to imagine that you have a hot take. What's your hot take on GitHub Copilot?
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