Engineer Asks AI to Rewrite His Multimeter Overnight, Wakes Up to Find It Working and His Profession Reading Zero Volts

Dave Jones has spent years teaching engineers to distrust hype. This week he finally measured some, and the needle went off the scale.

The EEVblog host pointed Claude Code at the compiled firmware of his own 121GW multimeter and asked it to turn the binary back into C. Then he did what every great engineer does at the critical moment: he went to bed. By morning the AI had rebuilt the bootloader and the full meter application, 691 functions in all, and the new firmware ran on the real meter. Bluetooth included. Most humans can't get Bluetooth working with the original firmware.

His video description is a model of restraint: "Claude Code reverse engineered the entire 12GW firmware into C with a single prompt in under 24 hours, and it works!" The 121GW has quietly become the 12GW, the first sign of a man who no longer trusts his own fingers. He adds: "The field of software engineering has changed completely." Change is easier to accept when it happens while you're asleep. Ask anyone who woke up in a new time zone or a new tax bracket.

The chapter list reads like a five-act tragedy written by a toaster. There is "Be in awe at my Prompt Engineering skillz," a title that carries the entire career of one prompt. There is "Conspiracy theory time..." There is "Why is it this painful?", a question humans asked about firmware for forty years before handing the job to something that cannot feel pain. And there is "Let the HUMAN test it!", the most humbling promotion in history: from author to crash-test dummy.

The final chapter is titled "Conclusion: Software Engineering is so OVER." It is the first eulogy ever delivered by the man holding the shovel, the flowers and a working multimeter.

To be fair to the machines, it wasn't perfect the first time. In the previous episode, one attempt failed outright, and a later run produced firmware that worked until the meter suddenly stopped responding. That isn't a bug. That's a junior developer's entire first year, compressed into an afternoon.

Turning machine code back into readable C normally takes weeks in a disassembler. Weeks. Entire beards have been grown. The AI did it with Ghidra and GCC, both free, which means the most expensive parts of the operation were the electricity and Dave's pride. The code is now on GitHub under the MIT licence, which is legal language for "take it, I'm going to look for a new hobby."

The implications are serious. Old gadgets can be repaired without their original source code. Closed firmware is no longer much of a lock. And somewhere a programmer is reading this on a laptop designed by a person who still has a job, for now.

A multimeter exists to tell you, calmly and precisely, how much current is flowing and where. Dave's now does it on code no human typed. It still reads volts, ohms and amps. It now also reads the room.

Software engineering may be over. But somebody still has to go to bed so the computer can work, and on that job Dave Jones remains the best in the business.