A lot of that magic still remains in embedded.

If vendors can't be bothered to use a C compiler from the last decade, I don't think they'll be adopting AI anytime soon.

At my work, as of 2026, we only now have a faction riled up about evangelizing clean code, OOP, and C++ design patterns. I hope the same delay keeps for all the rest of the "abstraction tower".

It is happening in embedded as well. I noticed just the upgrade from Gemini 2.5 to 3.0 Pro went from "I can get the assembly syntax mostly right but I don't understand register lifetimes" to "I can generate perfect assembly by hand".

I just saw a Reddit post yesterday about somebody that successfully one-shot in Gemini 2.5 the bare metal boot code for a particular board with the only input being the board's documentation.

The issue is that AI will be creating software at whatever abstraction layer it is asked to produce. Right down to ASM maybe even machine code if someone actually wanted or needed that. Perhaps not the AI of today but given a few years I'll be quite surprised if it still can't.