Niklas HauserI'm now maintaining modm for over 12 years and I've spent so much of my time fixing the CI, adapting to third-party API breaks, adding build system support, upgrading compilers. All of this is interesting the first time, but over time it becomes a drag. I've been wanting to refactor the I2C API for a long time, I want to add DMA by default to everything, I'd love to integrate our fibers into every driver, add tracing functionality. But I'm stuck preventing modm from just rotting away.
With LLMs I can offload all this mundane and boring labor, that is not original or interesting in any way, to the machine! And suddenly I've gotten way more fun out of modm again. I'm much less afraid to refactor cos the LLM just grinds through all the compile errors while I cook dinner. This is very amazing for me personally, it actually allows me to focus on things I enjoy working on again, specifically the APIs, the code generator and the data sources.
There is such a weird disconnect in my head, where I still think of modm as this big group effort of the robotics club students at the RWTH, but in reality it's mostly just me and occasionally a few other devs now who maintain it. And new people just know me as the "creator of modm" and I just anwer "I only wrote most of it" and then they laugh cos they think I'm being modest… I wish more people would contribute, but I don't like to evangelize it and pretend like it's better than other things.
It's so weird having people look up to you non-sarcastically. Like… I don't have a master plan, I just look into things I find interesting along the way. Surely I do this very intensely and with an (unreachable) expectation of excellence, but I don't know any different. I don't understand how people can go through life and not immediately overdose on everything they find interesting.
Lol, complained about not getting contributions, then suddenly six PRs in two weeks contributing drivers and examples.
Paul Targosz 🦦@salkinium what if the think its not interesting? or worse, they are not bothered by shit solutions