Arduino's Cloud Editor Gets an LLM-Powered Helper: The Arduino AI Assistant

Arduino has announced that its Cloud Editor development environment now comes with a little helper — in the form of the large language model (LLM)-powered Arduino AI Assistant.

"This expert coding companion truly understands your project and board, and can generate and fix your code in seconds," the Arduino team claims of the new feature, which for now is exclusive to the browser-based Arduino Cloud Editor. "We know that many of you already use other AI tools to assist with coding, but switching back and forth between different platforms is frustrating. That's why we built an AI Assistant directly into the Cloud Editor, where it has the full context of your project and can make coding easier, faster, and more intuitive than ever before."

Powered by Anthropic's Claude large language model (LLM), the Arduino AI Assistant is able to generate code — from boilerplate to entire sketches — and analyze existing code to find and fix bugs or explain how a particular function works. All of this works by breaking down the code into tokens and feeding them to Claude, which returns the most statistically-likely response tokens — which is to say there's no understanding involved, and the code it returns is not always going to be correct nor functional.

The Arduino team, though, claims that the assistant has a better chance than most at getting things right, thanks to deeper task-specific training. "The Arduino AI Assistant is trained on Arduino documentation, libraries, and code examples," the company claims, "so it really knows the Arduino ecosystem. That means you get accurate, relevant help tailored to your board, your libraries, and your project. It’s like chatting with an expert who's read all the docs (so you don’t have to)."

The release comes on the back of increasing LLM-based artificial intelligence deployment, and as "vibe coding" — in which the output of LLMs is used as-is, without investigation or understanding by the human prompting its generation, to rapidly build functional prototypes — grows in popularity. Arduino has not, however, addressed any of the concerns surrounding LLM technology, including the environmental impact, unauthorized use of copyright materials in expansive training datasets and the duplication of said copyright materials verbatim in their output, the tendency towards "hallucination" rather than returning no answer at all, nor the more concerning suggestion that generative AI reliance can stunt its users' critical thinking faculties.

The AI Assistant is now available in the Arduino Cloud Editor, with free-tier users able to carry out 30 "interactions" each month; Maker Plan users, at $6.99 a month, get up to 1,500 interactions per month, while Team and Enterprise Plan users receive unlimited interactions. In all cases, the output of the assistant should be carefully inspected and verified before use.