I see this over and over again. I don't dispute your experience. My experience with ESP32 development has been unreasonably positive. My codebase is sitting around 600k LoC and is the product of several hundred Opus 4.x Plan -> Agent -> Debug loops. I review everything that goes through, but I'm reviewing the business logic and domain gotchas, not dumb crap like what you and so many others describe.

What is so strange to me is that surely there is more C# out there than ESP-IDF code? I don't have a good explanation beyond saying that my codebase is extensively tested and used; I would know very quickly if it suddenly started shitting the bed in the way you explain.

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whaleidk 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

600k lines of code for anything on the ESP32 sounds like the absolute polar opposite of “good”

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ivan_gammel 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The more code is out there, the worse is the average in the training dataset. There will be legacy approaches and APIs, poor design choices, popular use cases irrelevant for your context etc that increase the chances of output not matching your expectations. In Java world this is exactly how it works. I need 3-5 iterations with Claude to get things done the way I expect, sometimes jumping straight to manual refactoring and then returning the result to Claude for review and learning. My CLAUDE.md (multiple of them) are growing big with all patterns and anti-patterns identified this way. To overcome this problem model needs specialized training, that I don‘t think the industry knows how to approach (it has to beat the effort put in the education system for humans).

	▲	mjdiloreto 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I also believe this must be true. Try asking Claude to program in Forth, I find the results to be unreasonably good. That's probably because most of the available Forth to train on is high quality.
	▲	re-thc 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> To overcome this problem model needs specialized training, that I don‘t think the industry knows how to approach We already have coding tuned models i.e. Codex. We should just have language / technology specific models with a focus on recent / modern usage. Problem with something like Java is too old -- too many variants. Make a cut off like at least above Java 8 or 17.

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xienze 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> My experience with ESP32 development has been unreasonably positive. My codebase is sitting around 600k LoC and is the product of several hundred Opus 4.x Plan -> Agent -> Debug loops.

I feel like this is an example of people having different standards of what “good” code is and hence the differing opinions of how good these tools are. I’m not an embedded developer but 600K LOC seems like a lot in that context, doesn’t it? Again I could be way off base here but that sounds like there must be a lot of spaghetti and copy-paste all over the codebase for it to end up that large.

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surajrmal 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's that large. Keep in mind embedded projects take few if any dependencies. The standard library in most languages is far bigger than 600k loc.

	▲	whaleidk 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I work with ESP32 devices and 600k lines of code is insane.
	▲	the__alchemist 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm curious: What does this device do?