[David Bloomfield] wanted to make some tweaks to an embedded system, but didn’t quite have the requisite skills. He decided to see if vibe coding could help.
[David]’s goal was simple. To take the VESC Telemetry Display created by [Lukas Janky] and add some tweaks of his own. He wanted to add more colors to the display, while changing the format of the displayed data and tweaking how it gets saved to EEPROM. The only problem was that [David] wasn’t experienced in coding at all, let alone for embedded systems like the Arduino Nano. His solution? Hand over the reins to a large language model. [David] used Gemini 2.5 Pro to make the changes, and by and large, got the tweaks made that he was looking for.
There are risks here, of course. If you’re working on an embedded system, whatever you’re doing could have real world consequences. Meanwhile, if you’re relying on the AI to generate the code and you don’t fully understand it yourself… well, the possibilities are obvious. It pays to know what you’re doing at the end of the day. In this case, it’s hard to imagine much going wrong with a simple telemetry display, but it bears considering the risks whatever you’re doing.
We’ve talked about the advent of vibe coding before, too, with [Jenny List] exploring this nascent phenomenon. Expect it to remain a topic of controversy in coding circles for some time.
“It pays to know what you’re doing at the end of the day. ”
Just imagine the damage an AI-driven poster could do.
It would take over the rains and rein until it reigned.
I need the world to stop calling it ‘vibe coding.’ It’s being a project manager. Vibe coding is when I have a glass of whiskey and write a stream of garbage code guided by pure vibes until it works, then come back the next day and write it again sober and neatly. It’s the old ‘write drunk, edit sober.’
There are no vibes in telling a robot to work harder for you.
IIRC optimum drunkness for coding is called the Balmer level.
I feel this post so much. When wife and kid are away I get so many projects hashed out like this
I would like to read zero (0) more reports on topics like this.
That Hackaday finds this level of fumbling around worthy of reporting on is highly disappointing.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I did spend a bit of time directing Gemini and bug squashing to make the screen usable but in the end Gemini wrote 100% of this code, and it does what I want it to do. Like it or not I think this is going to get much more common as English becomes the programming language of choice.
Maxim 43 : “If it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid and you’re lucky.”
‘It is better to be lucky than good.’ (Not sure which rule of acquisition that is)
Everybody wants to ‘get lucky’.
‘Getting good’ involves work, lots of work, too much for most of population.
The term “vibe coding” needs to die (unless referencing the field of dildonics)
If writing out a series of instructions in your native language is “coding” then recipe books are culinary coding.
But they are…