Alex Lennon
Alex Lennon has been working with embedded Linux and OpenEmbedded for at least 15 years (possibly longer, but his memory is shot). He's the founder of Dynamic Devices Ltd and delivered a keynote at Yocto Project Summit 2022.
Over the past few months, Alex has been experimenting with AI-assisted development workflows for Yocto projects, learning what works, what doesn't, and where the real productivity gains lie. His recent work includes automated hardware testing, remote target debugging, and power optimization workflows - all enhanced by AI collaboration.
Alex believes the embedded community needs to figure out AI integration together, sharing both the successes and the failures to develop practical best practices.
Session
After a few months of using Cursor AI backed by claude-4-sonnet in agentic mode on Yocto / OpenEmbedded development, I want to share the genuine productivity transformations I've experienced, and the critical lessons about where it goes wrong.
I'll show you how AI helped me remote into target hardware via SSH, capture webcam images of running code, analyse the output, and iterate until our e-ink display worked correctly. I'll demonstrate automated power consumption monitoring feeding back into BSP optimisation workflows.
I'll also share the gotchas: when AI creates overly complex solutions, goes down rabbit holes, and happily does the nonsensical things if you ask it to.
The key insight? You need feedback loops, you need experience, and you need to stay in control,
I'm hoping to begin a conversation with the community about how we build best practice to leverage AI pair programming in future.