[TriEmbed] The enshittification of Arduino begins? Qualcomm starts clamping down @itsfoss2

Sat Nov 22 10:19:58 CST 2025

Your use of AI is fascinating.  I very seldom come to meetings since Covid when I got out of the habit but I would love to hear a talk on this topic.  I’ve played with AI for writing toy apps, mostly web apps that fetch and organize data- pretty basic.  I’m an analog EE and I’m comfortable with assembly and C on small uC’s.  My main use of a micro is to tickle mixed signal hardware to enable mostly analog based instruments.  

I guess Arduino has run its course.  What was really special about it was that it democratized and lowered the bar for fooling with microcontrollers.  Before Arduino, you would use manufacturer provided tools or poorly documented GNU stuff, which is really at the core of Arduino today.  It integrates the compiler and hides a lot of complexity like linking, make files and libraries.  I never trusted Arduino code for any real use case, it was good for hacking together an interface to new hardware etc.  The main problem that I had with it was that you could include some libraries and build something but it was very brittle, there weren’t any standards for how resources were shared and once you got to something workable, you’d have these intractable bugs that would force to get into the libraries and rewrite them to structure them and integrate them together.  The biggest project that I ever did was a software defined Ham radio using a Teensy with a good audio/dsp library by Paul Stoffgen.  The result was pretty amazing and not something I could have done from the ground up.  It was also pretty rickety and I never fully understood what all the code was doing.  I got it to the perf board stage but never really wrapped it up and packaged it up.  Good prototyping tool that won’t help you with making something robust.

I was really surprised to see Qualcomm acquire Arduino and am amazed by what they are rumored to have paid (allegedly around $250M).  I knew that they would change things and you can see this creeping enshitification as you call it already.  I guess all good things must come to an end.  It was fun while it lasted.

Take care all and Happy Thanksgiving.
Regards,
John M. Wettroth
E: jwet at mindspring.com
M: (919) 349-9875 
H:  (984) 329-5420

From: TriEmbed <triembed-bounces at triembed.org> On Behalf Of Trampas Stern via TriEmbed
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2025 8:47 AM
To: Triangle Embedded Computing Discussion <triembed at triembed.org>
Subject: Re: [TriEmbed] The enshittification of Arduino begins? Qualcomm starts clamping down @itsfoss2

In my personal opinion Arudino has been dying a slow death for years, mainly from then number of bugs in their code and libraries.  However it is really falling fast now because AI will be taking over that market area.

 In the last ~6 months AI has gotten really good at firmware/software development.  I had AI write an entire web app that monitors remote servers data logs and alerts me on failures, I did not write or edit a single line of code. Around 80%-90% of code I develop is AI based now (even embedded), as such I no longer care about the programming language, APIs, etc.  

For example, I now write chip drivers by feeding datasheet to AI where it writes the driver for me, and will not go back to doing it manually ever again. 
Needed FATFS and SD card driver, just told AI to add to project and include test cases to verify it worked.  Which it did, and worked on the first try, of course this was Zephyr based project so not a huge lift, but it worked. 
Even Zephyr device trees are insignificant to AI, I don't have to figure out convoluted syntax or setup, I just tell AI what I want.  Even had AI write python test cases to run on desktop which verify that Bluetooth worked correctly. 

The point is that when you can ask AI to setup a development container and IDE for your embedded project, then write code and test cases, so there is little need for Arduino. 

I should mention that I was debating on learning Rust for embedded development last year, I choose not to.  Specifically, AI is at the point that the programming language is irrelevant. That is AI will be able to translate code from one language to another with little effort. Also it will be able to verify that C/C++ is just as safe as Rust code.  As such embedded development will be moving to a job of project management, where you are managing the project requirements, testing and tasking AI with writing code. 

Even on the webserver project AI was having a hard time with javascript component, kept having lots of syntax mistakes. So I told it to write a lint tool to verify its results. So it wrote a javascript lint tool and would run it and fix its own mistakes.  Basically AI today is as good as college level intern.  That is it makes some dumb mistakes but can be highly productive with the correct "management". 

I see  AI technology is much like computers were in the 80s that is everyone could see how they would be use and the advantages of having one on everyone's desk.  It will redefine the job market much like computers changed the typing pools at large companies.  That is there will be a shift in skills you need for a job towards AI.  

The point is if you are worried about Arudino, instead take some time and try the latest AI using copilot and VSCode, you might find like me that Arudino is insignificant, like a typewriter.   

Trampas

On Sat, Nov 22, 2025 at 1:13 AM Dwight Morgan via TriEmbed <triembed at triembed.org <mailto:triembed at triembed.org> > wrote:
The enshittification of Arduino begins? Qualcomm starts clamping down @itsfoss2

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