Building an LLM Robot with My Son — EP 1. Designing the AI Coding Agent Harness
Building an LLM Robot with My Son — EP 1. Designing the AI Coding Agent Harness There was a day when I first asked Claude Code to write robot code. "Write Arduino code to control two DC motors with PWM using an L298N motor driver. IN1 on pin 8, IN2 on pin 9, ENA on pin 10. IN3 on pin 11, IN4 on pin 12, ENB on pin 13." The code came back clean. But when I tested it, the motors behaved wrong. ENA was assigned to pin 10, and internally the code was touching Timer1 — which was conflicting with the Servo library I had running. The error message was vague. It took two hours to find the cause. Claude didn't know I was also using the Servo library. It didn't consider the relationship between pin 10 and Timer1 in the context of my setup. As generic code, it wasn't bad. It just didn't know my project. That one bug was enough to reach the conclusion: you can't just use a generic AI coding tool as-is. What Breaks When You Use Generic AI Tools for Embedded Proje...