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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : More AI magic with Dave's Garage
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LeoNicolas Guru  Joined: 07/10/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 549 |
From Zero to READY: Recreating C64 BASIC in Visual Studio Code |
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| Volhout Guru Joined: 05/03/2018 Location: NetherlandsPosts: 5538 |
Impressive, Although the small 4 line program showed a problem (TAB missing), the debugging of larger basic programs will show more. No doubt. But it is impressive that it is possible at all. With sufficient focus and money (payed AI licenses ?) you might get C64 basic in few days. So a 13y old whizzkid with time to spare could create MMBasic (Geoff and Peters work, and many others, that took 14 years 2011-2025) in a week or so. Terrifying.... Volhout PicomiteVGA PETSCII ROBOTS |
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| matherp Guru Joined: 11/12/2012 Location: United KingdomPosts: 10709 |
No: not without understanding exactly what he was trying to achieve and the environment in which he was trying to achieve it. As I said in the previous thread, the role of the programmer is dead but the roles of systems analyst, systems architect and designer are now the crucial areas and needed skills Edited 2025-12-17 02:34 by matherp |
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karlelch Senior Member  Joined: 30/10/2014 Location: GermanyPosts: 278 |
I fully agree |
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| robert.rozee Guru Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 2472 |
while i am not a fan of the 'AI revolution', the results in Dave Plummer's video are really impressive. although, i do wonder if the AI started out with a synthesis from various source code for BASIC interpreters out on the net? here is a question for Peter and/or Geoff: if you took the source code for the Micromite MKII MMBasic (ie, MX170) and presented it to one of these AI's with instructions to optomize the source code such that the compiled binary was (a) no less efficient wrt to speed, (b) minimized wrt the generated binary size, what would the result be? the reason i suggest the MX170 version is that it is feature-complete and well-tested, while already constrained wrt binary size. if the AI could squeeze 10k or so of extra flash space out of it, then there may be some possibility to, for instance, add in onboard SD card support. or double precision FP maths. cheers, rob :-) Edited 2025-12-17 07:08 by robert.rozee |
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| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4171 |
Rob, I think that's too hard - currently. The code could be squashed a bit (now, by hand) but would (I feel) be less and less readable/maintainable. Getting 10K? My feeling is no chance. John |
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phil99 Guru Joined: 11/02/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2873 |
Almost certainly less human readable/maintainable, but once you go down the AI path is that necessary? If needed AI can be used to explain how the resulting code works and do the maintenance when required. Edit. It would be a bit like Crunching a MMBasic program. You would still have the source code and can re-do the whole process if there are serious problems. AI can also be used to create a suite of test programs to ensure no new bugs are introduced. Edited 2025-12-17 08:02 by phil99 |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9786 |
I rather like Dave's channel, and I watch a few of his videos, including this one. Glad you thought enough of it, to link it here.  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| LeoNicolas Guru Joined: 07/10/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 549 |
There is another video where he creates an entire new Notepad app using AI. https://youtu.be/bmBd39OwvWg?si=1oRDqHgpkVV-SWYN I agree with Peter. I've been using AI to speed up my work, helping with the development of some algorithms, APIs, unit tests, etc. I like to use the analogy of building an airplane. We cannot just ask an LLM to create an entire air plane project, with its hundreds of thousands of parts, but we can use an AI to help with each part. The architects and engineers are responsible for the idea, the instructions, and the overall picture and to put all together, and the AI can help with each part. |
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| pwillard Guru Joined: 07/06/2022 Location: United StatesPosts: 327 |
The thing is, if you give the Chatbot some meat to chew on, it will generally produce decent results as compared to starting from scratch with just your initial prompting. I recently asked the Chatbot to help me write an image converter in Python, knowing that it has some decent image mangling tools like the PILLOW library. I found an image format descriptor workup in C# language (a language I know little about). Still, after feeding that header file and related C# file, it produced a working Python script that could convert proprietary Microsoft (read: mostly undocumented) image format to PNG files for editing with just a couple of prompt iterations. Amazing, actually. |
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