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AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail !

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https://youtu.be/1aGIpoakZTY

The third and most honest episode in the story of a technician and his AI
partner — and the one where the partnership finds its real shape.

It started with a clean win. In Python, Tkinter, databases and glue code,
DeepSeek proved invaluable — it co-authored Regmon, the register monitor
that reads the live STM32 silicon over the debug wire, and LiveCheck, the
tool that checks your Forth against the real chip as you type. Two applications
a technician needed for decades. The tooling was a complete, unambiguous
success.

Then came the walls. The hardware wall — a Nokia 5110 LCD brought up over
and over, every blank screen tracing back to a wire, never a word. The lesson:
the human proves the bench, the agent amplifies the design. Then the
configuration wall — the code claiming the SPI was a master while the live
register read showed it running as a slave, plus a timing trap that truncated
every byte. Both found by believing the silicon, not the comments.

And then, once every piece of infrastructure was in place — the hardware
proven, the SQLite databases built, the MCP servers wired — the real wall
appeared. The one the tooling can't fix: the training data.

DeepSeek is deeply trained in Python and C, but Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth is a
niche dialect of a niche language, and the model's training data for it is thin
— beginner-level at best. The AI can read registers, build databases and write
MCP servers, but when it comes to actually designing and writing the Forth, it
is honestly a basic Forth beginner.

Terry's conclusion, stated plainly: the agent builds the tooling and answers
the design questions, but the human does all the Forth design — including the
coding. For now, Terry does Forth bench development alone. No more pair
programming in embedded Forth. Not a failure — an honest division of labour,
found the hard way, and it works.

This may change as training data grows, or if the C ecosystem shifts. But for
now: the tools are there, the design is human, and that's the honest state of
AI and Forth on a real bench.

(About the teller: Terry Porter is a 72-year-old electronics technician with
50 years of soldering and circuits, Forth since the 1990s. He dictates his
notes and an AI helps him write them up clearly — but the bench work itself,
the registers, the LEDs, the clocks, the measurements, is his, done live.)

Produced with the help of AI without which this video would not have been
possible

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Thread

AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Terry Porter <techman001@eternal-september.org> - 2026-09-01 02:36 +0000
  Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl - 2026-09-01 10:06 +0200
    Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Terry Porter <techman001@eternal-september.org> - 2026-09-01 08:44 +0000
      Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl - 2026-09-01 12:39 +0200
  Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2026-09-01 19:03 +0200
    Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Terry Porter <techman001@eternal-september.org> - 2026-09-01 20:37 +0000
      Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2026-09-01 23:15 +0200
      Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> - 2026-09-02 08:42 -0700
        Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Terry Porter <techman001@eternal-september.org> - 2026-09-02 20:21 +0000
          Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> - 2026-09-02 16:11 -0700
    Re: AI Forth Embedded Pair-Programming: Big Fail ! albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl - 2026-09-02 10:53 +0200

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