It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't.
Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped.
Meanwhile, the rest of us keep using AI as simple tools, like the person in the article. I wonder how long it will take before computers can program better than me, and I flip too.
I co-founded the Edge crypto-currency wallet in 2013, but my background is in electrical engineering. With 25 years of technical experience, I can lead high-performance teams to ship products across any level of the technology stack.
Nifty! I recently bought a RISC-V VisionFive 2 Lite SBC, which required a lot of mucking with firmware and talking to the U-Boot serial console before it would boot Linux for the first time. A tool like this would have been super-handy during that time.
On the other hand, I'm a low-budget hobby user. I like things that are cheap, easy, and hackable. It sounds like your product might be for more-advanced users? Or do all these fancy features stay tucked away until you need them? If you make your product cheaply, that might hurt profit margins, but it might also open up the low-end market. I have so many questions about the business side of this.
But really, I am most curious about the user experience. It's not super-helpful if learning the tool becomes its own project, so I'm hoping it's simple.
Edit: Oh, it's a software project. I thought it was a hardware project. My bad.
Well, that just makes it worse! OP strongly implies that there is no good variable-speed solution, but if the industry already has an assortment of products, what exactly are they even selling?!
Normal wiring is terrible, though, since it only supports turning the equipment on & off. If you have a variable-speed fan and variable-speed pumps, it would be nice for the thermostat to throttle those based on the load, but it can't.
If this company has a solution for variable-speed equipment, the best thing they can do is publish an open standard. Suppose the thermostat talks to the equipment over CAN bus, for instance, using a well-documented protocol. If they go out of business, anybody can hack together a compatible aftermarket thermostat.
A lot of solar equipment is already going this way, with batteries talking to inverters over open CAN bus protocols. As one of the biggest energy loads, the HVAC equipment should get in the game too.
Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped.
Meanwhile, the rest of us keep using AI as simple tools, like the person in the article. I wonder how long it will take before computers can program better than me, and I flip too.