Vibe School: Making dumb devices smart with AI
Dr Katie Paxton Fear
DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Main Stage
Dr. Katie Paxton Fear, known online as Insider PhD and a Security Advocate at Smrat, took the DEF CON audience on a "deeply unserious" yet highly insightful journey into the practicalities and pitfalls of using large language models (LLMs) for hardware hacking. Titled "Vibe School: Making dumb devices smart with AI," her talk meticulously documented an attempt to build a smart weather station from scratch, relying almost exclusively on AI guidance. The core premise was to test whether an AI, specifically Google's Gemini, could serve as an effective "vibe coding" partner for a hardware novice, guiding them through complex electronic projects without requiring extensive prior knowledge or manual research.
AI review
A competent, honest, and entertainingly self-aware case study on AI-assisted hardware hacking that earns its DEF CON slot through candor rather than depth. Paxton Fear documents a real experiment with real failures, which is more than most 'AI in security' talks manage, but the technical ceiling is low and the findings won't surprise anyone who's spent serious time with LLMs or embedded systems.