Back to Basic

If you read my last post then you have a pretty good idea how conflicted I feel about AI and how I’m trying to find balance within programming. In that search I think I found a path I’m going to take for now.

My wife got me a Picocalc for Christmas. It just got here this week, and man it’s a fun device. Essentially a keyboard, speaker, and screen hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Pico H. It includes multiple firmwares you can run, but the most general purpose one is for mmbasic, a remake of basic for micro controllers. Back in the day when people got computers, they had to learn how to program to use them using something like basic. You would write programs that helped compute or handle tasks. What’s nice about mmbasic is that it has a few extra tricks that older computers didn’t really have.

With that said, one of my goals is to return to basic (pun intended) and use this little device to solve programming challenges. Having the limitations of basic feels like a nice creative restriction. Ironically, I found a good use for AI in this setup. The manual for mmbasic is a 200 page PDF, not something I can read on this tiny device. So I had Claude dissect the manual into smaller markdown chunks I can open on the picocalc. Now I have everything I need on this chunky scientific calculator, and wherever I take it, I can build.

I’m still working through the Rust book which I plan to continue alongside the picocalc, but if push comes to shove I’ll put it on pause until I have more dedicated time. I still want to learn it for the versatility, and just the lower level knowledge that comes with it.

I plan to still use AI in my day to day work, and in some of my side projects, but that’s about it. There are more thoughts on the topic of AI since I discovered radiant.computer but will save that for a longer post. For now, I’m going back to basic.