Now instead of making the comparison with an automatic lawnmower, what would you say if I use your argument when you let a roomba vacuum your room unsupervised instead of asking the neighbor kid to sweep it a broom? This is why it is going to get real philosophical if we want to judge how lazy a person is based on the level of delegation he put on a tool.
The guy is not a software/embedded engineer. He's a bike engineer. He doesn't want to code more than needed to get his idea working. As for reverse engineering, he did plenty of it. He soldered the serial interface into the board, fired up a serial terminal, watch the output & note down the data sent through the wire for each event on the bike. Two things he used LLM for:
- Work through the decompiled app & find the commands for controlling the bike
- Write an app to run on the CYD.
What would be the things he would have needed to do face if he had somebody work on this project instead of Claude:
- Find somebody in his close vicinity, and have him over the workshop everyday, because this project requires access to the hardware.
- If he instead found somebody else with another Revo bike, they would have to collaborate really closely & replicate what each other have found to the other person's setup.
All that for a vanity, 1-person project?