For the last couple of months, I've been using AI to develop a custom firmware for the ESP32 microcontroller family in my free time. This has been an interesting and educational experience, and I would like to share some thoughts on it.
First, I want to start by describing the idea and motive behind this project. I grew up in a Brazilian rural area, where milking is a major economic activity. One day a technician was fixing some milking equipment for my father when he complained about how expensive some PCBs replacements for milking equipment could be, then he asked me if I could develop him a compatible board for a cleaning equipment. Since the cleaning cycle was not that complex – basically opening and closing solenoid valves, heating liquids, starting and stopping motors, checking water levels, etc., and I already had developed a couple projects using the ESP microcontroller family (without any AI assistance), and, more importantly, I do like challenges, I decided to build such board.
Second, I want to give a small summary of my prior experience with AI. My first contact with LLMs was back in 2022 when GPT 3.5 was launched. Since then, I have been using LLMs mainly for quick queries using their web interface, even though I’ve already used OpenAI’s API to perform data extraction in a bibliometric dataset. Thus, I had no prior contact with tools such as Claude Code or Google Antigravity, nor I looked for “best practices” while using AI-assisted development. This means I was learning on my own.
