I built 2,000 badges for Replay and I’m not sure I’ve slept since December

This post details the author's personal experience building 2,000 custom hardware badges for the Replay conference, leveraging generative AI (Claude, Codex) for firmware development in C. It highlights the challenges of scaling from a single prototype to mass production, including coordinating manufacturing in Shenzhen, managing PCB fabrication, and developing firmware for an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with various peripherals. The author emphasizes the role of AI in enabling them to undertake firmware development despite lacking prior experience, using extensive testing (Playwright, unit tests) to validate AI-generated code. The post also touches upon the inspiration from DEF CON badges and the generosity of Pimoroni in sharing their expertise. While not directly describing the Ignition system, it showcases a complex, large-scale hardware deployment orchestrated and managed using Temporal principles, demonstrating the platform's capability to handle intricate, multi-stage projects with external dependencies and physical product manufacturing.