"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

Post by klaff » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #61

nospice wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The core issue isn't that LLMs are bad at circuits, it's that we're asking them to do novel design when they should be doing selection and integration. I don't want to detract from what you're building, but I'm puzzled by this sentence. It very much sounds like the problem is that they're bad at circuits and that you're working around this problem by making them choose from a catalog. Try that for code. "The proble…

I only had undergrad EE training so maybe I’m out of touch with what’s done in industry. But, I think most human engineers mostly don’t design novel circuits either. Chips come with specification sheets that have some reference implementations. So obviously somebody at the company designs that reference implementation, but I think most users stick pretty close to it…

Post by magrietdennis » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

Post by rcxdude » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

nospice wrote: post #15

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

Why, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGP…

Both Gemini and ChatGPT have a pretty comically wrong knowledge of op-amps. They usually recommend outdated chips and are confused about circuit topologies. I was looking at this last week and it hasn't changed. I asked them to suggest and evaluate microphone circuits and they were just bad. I would really, really recommend reading some human-written text if you're learning about that. I can't think of any reason why…

Post by robocat » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 12:29 AM UTC

cbdevidal wrote: post #20

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

Why, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGP…

Just this morning I was vibing with Gemini to make a battery-powered stove monitor to sell that I might call "Yes I turned off the stupid stove" :-) Gemini was suggesting the circuit design and of course I'd do the final work myself, but I find vibe-circuit-building to be quite valuable.

  The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work.

  Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

  It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

  So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

  And it worked.

  She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

  And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?

  But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.