Content
Hello everyone, I am Bug Jun~
Recently, while chatting with a few friends, I couldn’t help but sigh, “Technology is developing too fast.” I remember the days in the school laboratory, holding the 51 development board to play with the running lights, driving a few digital tubes to run a timer, and I could be happy for half a day — that pure technical joy is still vivid in my mind.
1
The 51 Microcontroller Era
I especially remember 2012, driven by a passion for electronic technology, I was determined to participate in the school competition through the selection of the intelligent vehicle team. To achieve this goal, I spent several months in the library, tinkering with electronic design, and during the preliminary round, I stayed up several nights to finally tackle the motor PID speed control.
At that time, I was using the STC 51 microcontroller. Of course, looking back now, the task doesn’t seem complex, but it was quite challenging to do it manually: I had to adjust the voltage through a sliding potentiometer, detect it with an ADC, and use the PID algorithm to adjust the duty cycle to control the small DC motor’s forward and reverse rotation, while also displaying the relevant information on the LCD1602. From building the circuit to debugging the code, I had to do everything myself.
The result was somewhat rushed, and there were quite a few issues; during the demonstration, there were some mistakes. Watching others’ smooth presentations made me feel like I had no chance, but I was still selected. When I reminisced about the past, I asked the senior why he chose me, and he simply said, “I just felt that the project was completed independently by you, while others seemed to have a lot of fluff~” Perhaps this is the binary mindset of technical people.
Yes, back then, the resources available online were scarce, setting up a compilation environment was fraught with issues, and coding required typing everything out line by line. Unlike now, where most code can be handled with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Moreover, there was an even bigger headache: many examples were developed in assembly language, which had a high barrier to entry. I once stubbornly studied assembly programming for a while, and just understanding it took a lot of effort; if I had to design a program, I believe I would have been overwhelmed.
I used to think that mastering the 51 microcontroller would allow me to do quite a lot. After joining a new team, I was exposed to higher-performance chips like Freescale’s K60 and STM32F103. Even at that time, the big shots in the neighboring lab were already starting to trim kernels. New technologies, new knowledge, new peripherals, and new architectures came rushing in, and most of them had to be tackled by poring over official documentation multiple times. It was nothing like the current situation where training materials and open resources are abundant.
2
The AI-Assisted Development Era
Now, looking at the AI era, everything is even more different. If you have questions, you can ask AI at any time; if you want code, it can quickly provide a preliminary framework, and with slight modifications, it can basically be used. Many friends might feel that AI is unreliable and that the output is unusable. In fact, AI is more of an intelligent tool, an intelligent search library, similar to a search engine. The way you phrase your questions and search terms inherently contains issues of relevance and logic. If you let AI guess the answers, the final result will definitely fall short of expectations. In the future, the ease of coding will greatly increase, and the transformation and realization of technology will become much easier.
At this point, to avoid the crisis of aging programmers, we should consider: what skills will become scarce? The ability to understand technical knowledge and integrate technology will be key areas to cultivate in the future. The “knowledge base” of AI contains various technologies, but if you can’t even articulate your questions clearly or understand AI’s responses, then even the most powerful tools are useless. Having AI does not reduce your need to understand technology; it merely reduces the need for you to store and memorize knowledge.
Universal and mature technologies are no longer secrets in the AI era; general technologies can basically meet your product needs. What is truly important is how to translate these technologies into iterative upgrades of product functions. Therefore, the part of programmers “reinventing the wheel” will see a significant increase in efficiency in the short term, and ultimately, it will be gradually replaced. The ability to cleverly utilize and integrate existing AI to solve problems and create products or services that users love, even disrupting traditional industries — is the ability to “build a house using a hammer, screwdriver, and ruler”.
3
Which Era is Happier?
Now, let’s look at today’s theme: the “sense of happiness” for embedded developers in the two eras.
The happiness of the 51 microcontroller era is a kind of “hardcore, pure sense of conquest.” Resources were scarce, and every function had to be implemented from the ground up by hand. The immense sense of achievement from debugging an algorithm or a driver stemmed from a thorough mastery of every byte of hardware and the joy of overcoming difficulties. This happiness is the enlightenment after rigorous training, pure and profound.
In contrast, the happiness of the AI-assisted era is a kind of “efficient, empowering sense of creative freedom.” AI assistants have solved a large number of repetitive tasks (researching information, writing drivers, debugging), allowing you to focus your energy on architecture design, innovative implementation, and the product itself.
Some people feel that the development in the 51 microcontroller era was inefficient and meaningless, while others believe that the AI programming era lacks the soul of embedded development. What do you think?
Finally
That’s all I want to share with you today. If you found it helpful, be sure to give it a thumbs up~
A unique, permanent, and free platform for sharing embedded technology knowledge~
Recommended Albums Click the blue text to jump
☞ MCU Advanced Album 
☞ Embedded C Language Advanced Album 
☞ “Bug Says” Album 
☞ Album | Comprehensive Programming for Linux Applications
☞ Album | Learn Some Networking Knowledge
☞ Album | Handwritten C Language
☞ Album | Handwritten C++ Language
☞ Album | Experience Sharing
☞ Album | Power Control Technology
☞ Album | From Microcontroller to Linux
