Hardware setup, lack of knowledge, and building apps

I finally finished building my hardware setup to start digging more into this subject. It's been a while since I wanted to start it, and now it's possible.

Hardware Setup

Today, I will present a bit of my hardware setup, made using mostly ChatGPT, some videos, and articles about hardware hacking to keep it cheap but reliable.

Here is the result :

The desk is mostly made by Ikea to keep it cheap. I also use an old screen and an old mini pc to install Omarchy on it.

Why Omarchy? I don't know, I've heard a lot about this distro and wanted to try it. And it's pretty nice, coming from a MacBook, all my shortcuts are preserved on this distro, so way easier than I thought to use it.

I bought the iFixit Pro stuff to have something really nice in the long run, and it can also be useful to repair stuff.

For the soldering setup, I took the Pinecil v2, which was a good recommendation to start and pretty cheap too. And a basic multimeter.

I also bought some stuff, like a UART to USB and other devices. I followed the setup made for this course: https://training.brownfinesecurity.com/l/pdp/beginner-s-guide-to-iot-and-hardware-hacking

I'm also following this course to learn everything I can about HW, and this is actually pretty nice.

The whole setup, including the desk, cost me about 200 euros. So it wasn't that expensive to start. I also bought a cheap TP-Link to start understanding more about.

It's really nice learning new stuff and doing manual work. I will see in the coming weeks if I really enjoy that or not. Feel free to ask me any questions about the setup if you want.

Lack of knowledge

For a few weeks, it's crazy how everything is around AI, claude and agents. Everything changes day to day, and new apps are coming, new ways of working are coming as well.

But during this time, there are no nice write-ups or technical articles about anything other than AI. It's frustrating, to be honest. Our job was very technical, and some parts were very hard to understand; I loved this kind of challenge.

Now, everyone ( including me ) is using AI and Claude to build or to find bugs. And it's been more than a month since I didn't learn anything. If I have something technical, I ask Claude to fix it.

Of course, I can use the LLMs to learn stuff, but why do it when you can just ask it to find the solution and implement it ? We're living a huge change in the knowledge work, and I don't know where we are going.

I'm still asking myself a lot of questions about what to do next, and how, and it's frustrating to see new stuff arriving each week that breaks your whole workflow or way of thinking about your job. I try not to be pessimistic about that and try to push myself, trying new stuff I wanted to try for a long time, as now the time to build stuff has been drastically reduced.

Building apps

Speaking of building stuff, I'm working on an app for myself, in the running niche, and also another app with my friend Link.

It's so easy now to build stuff, push it to prod, push features, and fix bugs. But it's also frightening, as we don't read the entire codebase anymore. For some projects, I just don't read the code at all. From a security point of view, it's totally crazy.

I will try in the next few months to continue building stuff in my spare time and see if something can be big or not. It can be a great opportunity to implement stuff I always wanted to build before anyone else does.