16-year hardware engineer: Claude Code takes the paperwork, humans keep the hands

The author introduces himself as someone who has spent 16 years designing circuits and boards, from arcade game machines to toys, and now also runs a children's robot class. Over recent months he worked with Claude Code on a measurement logger built on an M5Stack, an avatar on a Raspberry Pi that appears and talks when it detects a person, evaluation of a new Bluetooth ranging feature measured between 1 and 5 meters, and prototype firmware for a battery-powered toy. Different genres, but in each one he says the AI became another development team member.

His account rests on concrete friction. The distance-measurement evaluation failed intermittently at 2m; he and the AI read logs and rechecked settings, but the answer came the moment he unplugged the USB cable connecting to the PC, after which the measurements stabilized. In a client inquiry about output remaining ON after a power-off, the AI offered a USB-power explanation he judged inconsistent with the hardware logic, and only after he pushed back did the work move toward a fix that cuts output in every power-off case.

What makes this account notable is the line he draws rather than the tools themselves. Since the work spanned a signal logger, an interactive avatar, ranging evaluation and toy firmware — and since long gaps between client requests are normal in contract work — the memory of a project becomes a deliverable an AI can maintain, which is why he has handover documents written and updated as work proceeds. The likely test of this arrangement is whether such handover records stay good enough that both he and the AI can regain context in minutes after weeks away, and whether younger engineers without his bench instincts can catch the plausible-but-wrong answers he describes catching.