Re: RSSC November Meeting Discussion

[Jim DiNunzio]

Hi Alan,

That’s great progress! 

Question: copilot lets you select the model it uses with higher  cost factors for premium ones like Claude. I noticed you had a premium one selected in the presentation. Have you found sigificant differences in performance among the models and have a preference?

Also, have you tried Cline AI agent? (Cline.bot)? It has two stages: plan and act, which you can pause between for human approval or modification. This seems to work well and sometimes better than copilot’s Agent at least as of 2 weeks ago. We have it at at work, and I found a way to install the public version for home use in MS Code.

What’s cool is that You can get an extension for ms code for it and give it access to the models you are paying for already with your copilot subscription (or any other direct model subscriptions)

Jim

On Oct 18, 2025, at 8:45 PM, Alan Timm <gest...@gmail.com> wrote:



So I've been moving forward with Alfie at a pace I could have only dreamed of a few months ago and realized "Hey, this might be a good subject for a talk!"

These AI powered coding assistants are the real deal, and I'd like to give a talk about it next month.  I think I could break it down into two parts, the first would be the utility for newer folks who just need a hand in arduino.  Not just assistance in writing code but assistance in learning about it.  The second part would be a real world scenario to create a ros2 node to handle the shoulder assembly, in a way that borders on science fiction, but it's actually real.

As a quick share, check out the sheer volume of dense commits to the codebase over the past few weeks (19, i just counted)

https://github.com/alansrobotlab2/alfiebot_ws.

And how I've already burned through the requests on my $10/m plan and moved to the $40/m plan just so I can keep jamming.  It's that good.

Alan

[Alan Timm]

Interesting, I'll have to check it out.

Of the available models under copilot everyone seems to agree that the claude models are by far the best coding models, so I've been sticking with claude 4 and now 4.5.  That being said, even the models available on the free plan are really capable, but when I ran out of credits a few days ago I didn't hesitate to slap down my credit card for the upgrade.

As just another example, what started with a minor refactor of my mksservo42c python code ended up with a complete refactor with comprehensive install guides and best practices. Then I set it loose on creating a version for arduino and it did not disappoint.

https://github.com/alansrobotlab2/mks-servo42c-10/tree/main

I did all this just this morning while I was waiting for a friend to arrive.

And that started with my copying over a wiki page about the servo as source material for the agent to work with, and to say it took the ball and ran with it is an understatement.

[Thomas Messerschmidt]

Has anyone compared this to the ChatGPT models?

Thomas Messerschmidt

-  

Need something prototyped, built or coded? I’ve been building prototypes for companies for 15 years. I am now incorporating generative AI into products.

Contact me directly or through LinkedIn:   

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-robotics/

On Oct 19, 2025, at 8:19 PM, Alan Timm <gest...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Alan Timm]

Hey Thomas good morning!

From a coding standpoint there's no comparison -- Claude 4 and 4.5 are miles ahead of all the other models.

And that's not just from my personal experience, the same opinion is held by almost everyone I talk to.

Michael offered a more thorough evaluaton over on HBRobotics.

https://groups.google.com/g/hbrobotics/c/pSirOlz9NcI.

Anthropic is definitely eating OpenAI's lunch in this regard.

Alan

[Thomas Messerschmidt]

Thanks. That helps me a lot. 

Thomas Messerschmidt

-  

Need something prototyped, built or coded? I’ve been building prototypes for companies for 15 years. I am now incorporating generative AI into products.

Contact me directly or through LinkedIn:   

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-robotics/

On Oct 20, 2025, at 8:02 AM, Alan Timm <gest...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Thomas good morning!

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