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I picked up a Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) — an ESP32 with a built-in LCD —
and tried to get it working from scratch. I had no idea what I was doing.
So I asked ChatGPT. That was my first mistake.
I thought this would take ten minutes. It took six hours. This is what ChatGPT actually taught me — and it wasn't what I expected.
What followed was six hours of boot loops, library rabbit holes, vibe coding,
and the slow realisation that I'd stopped thinking entirely. At some point I
became the slower, more confused half of the conversation.
But here's what I actually learned: the real problem in embedded programming isn't the code. It's vocabulary. You can't search for what you don't know exists. And it turns out that's where AI is genuinely useful — not as a code generator, but as a way of finding the words you need to go and read properly.
Zero to moving text on screen. Six hours. Not sure I'd have got there without it.
“Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio”
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Six hours. Just this.
1:25 The ASCII aquarium that started everything
2:28 Enter ChatGPT (first mistake)
3:50 Hello World — after an hour
4:40 The library maze
5:23 I realised I'd stopped thinking
6:57 What's actually different about this board
8:34 Sponsor — UPerfect portable monitor
12:49 The breakthrough (I'd been ignoring a setting)
15:38 A spinning cube I don't understand
17:17 The AI trap: outsourcing your brain
18:05 Back to the actual goal: ASCII text
19:05 Why learning is hard (it's the vocabulary)
20:01 What ChatGPT is actually good for
21:44 Six hours well spent. Mostly.
#uperfect. #WatchWithUPERFECT #ESP32 #CheapYellowDisplay #EmbeddedProgramming #Arduino #ChatGPT