They often don't have to know how the nitty-gritty of the HW works. HALs are used everywhere, and some of them abstract a lot away. I've interviewed embedded SWEs that couldn't explain how the tri-state buffers work within GPIO.

I work in FAANG at a non-US office, and this is what I tell my colleagues. I always get pushback: "They're too shy to speak English".

They'll often write messages in their native language, then ask AI to translate.

This is in a developed country, by the way. Engineers working for a US-based company refusing to speak English while getting paid handsomely.

If I only knew how

Elementary school: Stuff is actually made out of tiny little balls you can't see.

Middle school: Those tiny little balls are actually atoms, they consist of a positively charged core of protons/neutrons with negatively charged electrons flying around it. An atom is the smallest thing matter is made of. (Rutherford model)

High school: Those electrons don't just fly around, they actually orbit within specific energy levels. Also they're not really particles, but waves, but also particles, all at the same time. Also subatomic particles exist. (Bohr model)

University: "Electron orbits" are actually orbitals defined by the wavefunction of those electrons, like probability distributions. (Quantum Mechanics)

Don't forget to add "Make no mistakes" to the prompt

>These authors find that it has potent activity against the ion channel TRPM8, and that goes for other 7-nitro compounds in this series as well.

But later states

>For one thing, the other benzodiazepines aren’t much use; clonazepam really stands out on its own.

Wouldn't another 7-nitro compound also work? Flunitrazepam/Rohypnol, for example? A little bit of research shows it actually might[1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13426060/

I fear we humans are on the losing end of that reconsideration.

The last 10% is always the hardest part, though

The only reason for me still running Windows is for games.

But even that is changing rapidly nowadays.

I'm still on Win10, even though it's EOL. I should upgrade, and if I do, I'll upgrade to some Linux distro, not Win11.

The Outer Wilds is one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time. I would love to forget all about that game to just experience it again from scratch.

I consider typing to be secondary to software engineering, but I do concede that for those cases that typing really is the bottleneck, LLMs can certainly be of value.

Those cases are rare, though.

C is a language that is able to target basically every platform under the sun. It's versatile: User-space applications, kernel modules, and embedded firmware applications with an RTOS or even running on bare metal.

LLMs can produce basic C code, but (still) struggle with more specialized tasks.

They can be incredibly useful for skimming through long datasheet PDFs, but it's still up to the engineer to actually make sure the code it produces is actually good.