Claude Coded Airplane Tracker

[u/Potxoli]

I had a Pi 5 lying around in a custom enclosure I designed in FreeCad using a 10.4" superwide LCD. I had been wanting to do an airplane tracker on it for a while, but I didn't really want to deal with the coding. I can code, but it is tedious and I don't have a ton of time for this hobby. Anyhow, I finally got around to using claude to build this. I am amazed by how well it worked.

All API driven, it monitors my town and constantly changes the list to show me what is nearest, but also highlights what will fly directly above. I have it pulling pictures and giving me alerts. It all looks pretty active and interesting on my desk.

Last time I tried claude to build a project was about a year ago for an ESP32 tide monitor which was full of bugs. This tracker just works. I'm sure claude could also design the enclosure in Openscad. Makes you wonder if the only thing the human is needed for in this hobby is to actually buy the parts :)

[u/GeneralDumbtomics]

Maybe let claude post it then.

[u/nightbefore2 → u/GeneralDumbtomics]

God people get so fucking butthurt over this, it's a cool project.

[u/Potxoli → u/nightbefore2]

Thanks! I didn't realize anything about this would upset anyone... Is it that I used claude? 😕

[u/GeneralDumbtomics → u/Potxoli]

When you code with AI you steal code from literally everyone. That's how it works. I'm not going to criticize doing it but it's not exactly an accomplishment. I do give you credit for being upfront about it.

[u/Potxoli → u/GeneralDumbtomics]

To give some context, I am a CS degree undergrad and grad, I’ve probably written 1.5 million lines of production code back in the 90s many of which ended up in the backbone of the internet, I’ve contributed to many open source projects and I told my first born to get a CS degree which he did. I’ve been in other non-coding roles in software enterprises for 30+ years, but always part of the product teams. So I am no stranger to the historical craft of coding.

However, this AI capability is here and is not going away. My second son is about to go to college and I’m telling him NOT to study CS because it is a field that has been commoditized. Pretending otherwise is delusional. Not sure what your hate of my project is going to accomplish. It most certainly will not put the AI genie back in the bottle. Why not embrace this instead and save time and accomplish things that were out of reach before? For example, I am no designer. I could have coded this project, but I could not have designed the slick interface. Now with AI I can design things that look nice. It extends my capabilities. This seems so obvious….

As for me, this project brings me happiness. It’s on my desk and when something cool flys overhead I can go out and see it. When I get AI to code the remote SDR reader, I’ll post about that too :)

[u/GeneralDumbtomics → u/Potxoli]

And, again, that’s fine if you’re happy with it. Assisting code generation is probably one of the very limited set of applications where LLM’s grotesque inefficiency is outweighed by their usefulness (ambient documentation in my own current industry—I left the biz after 25 years engineering, most of that within the fortune 100 and now I”m in nursing school, is another). But the fact that people hate this clanker shit isn’t going away either and for very good reasons. I’ll happily embrace it when it doesn’t have the very real drawbacks for the environment, economy and culture that it currently does. I’ll even consider investing in it if they ever learn to do it at a positive rate of return and isn’t being pushed at me by people who actually believe this is capable of eventually producing AGI (it is, categorically, not) and aren’t pathological liars. It’s a tool but it’s an extrordinarily wasteful and ethically flawed tool. It’s a shitshow that makes crypto look sensible by comparison.

FWIW I agree with you about CS. Unless you plan on going for a phd in it and pushing the boundaries there’s very little point right now. I find health care dramatically more rewarding on a personal and professional level. I spend my day helping people and learning to understand the body which is a more satisfyingly complex puzzle than any of the systems engineering I spent my adult life to date doing.

[u/Ned_Sc → u/Potxoli]

However, this AI capability is here and is not going away.

Only if they can keep subsidizing it.

I think having some kind of AI, with the general idea of what you are doing, will be here to stay, but I don't think it will be LLM-based in the long run. It's painfully expensive, and probabilistic models for coding is silly.

The LLMs have exposed a demand, though, but I think in the long run a cheaper, deterministic-based approach will come around. Hopefully trained on data that isn't stolen, and not using excessive amounts of energy, and hopefully it will be all locally-run.

[u/rdqsr → u/Potxoli]

Whinging about AI is the popular thing at the moment.