The biggest test yet
I took my unfinished wireless OBS tally light project, left the workshop, and let an AI agent finish the code over Telegram. I did not touch the code myself. I wanted to see how far AI could carry a real maker project, not just a small task.
The project is a tally light for OBS, the open source streaming software I use. A tally light shows when a source is live, when I am recording, and when my microphone is muted, so I can see the state at a glance.
What I asked the AI to do
I had already done most of the project by hand, but I wanted the AI to finish the last part. I pointed it at the project in the programming folder, asked it to inspect it, and then told it what needed to be added.
- An 8 LED NeoPixel array on the ESP32
- A red LED for the stream going live
- A green LED for recording
- A red LED for the microphone being muted
- A simple boot animation on all eight LEDs so I could see the strip was alive
I also wanted the AI to talk to the microcontroller wirelessly through the workbench I had already set up.
What went wrong
When I got back, it did not work. That was my fault, not the AI’s. I had given it the wrong pin for the LEDs, so the code was built on bad information.
Once I corrected the pin, the LEDs did work. They still were not behaving exactly how I wanted, so I kept working with the AI and made the OBS connection details available through the environment files so it could query my setup properly.
The working result
After a few rounds of prompting and uploads, I ended up with a working prototype. It showed the key states I wanted: power, live, recording, and source activity.
The result took a fair bit of back and forth, but that was the point. I was not testing whether AI could write a perfect project in one go. I was testing whether it could help me finish something real.
What I learned
AI can help a lot on a well-documented project like Arduino, but only if I give it accurate hardware details and clear instructions. If I get the basics wrong, the whole thing falls apart.
For the next video in the series, I want to use a two-pronged approach with proper specification documents and a bit of extra help.
Previous videos in this series: