Symbulator, ten thousand days later

On 30 March 1999, I started writing on my TI-89 the first lines of TI-BASIC for a symbolic simulator of linear circuits.

That little calculator program, called Symbulator, required thousands of hours of coding and debugging. It went on to become a valuable free tool for thousands of electrical engineering students, won an international IEEE award, and served as my graduation thesis. It made me a stronger candidate for the Fulbright scholarship that took me to MIT and allowed me to fulfil my potential.

Symbulator may be the best thing I've crafted. I see it as part of my legacy. But as mobile phones and computers replaced calculators, it was at risk of disappearing into the obscurity of technological obsolescence.

To preserve it for the next generation, I decided to port it to Python and SymPy, as a PyPI package. The first symbulator package was published on 13 August 2026. Since then, through dozens of revisions, I've grown it into the beta version of Symbulator 9, now released as open source and capable of running on computers, tablets and phones, with exciting new features.

About ten thousand days separate the two landmark dates mentioned above. Nothing less than a technological revolution has taken place between them. Whereas the previous versions of Symbulator were coded entirely by hand, the latest was coded entirely by artificial intelligence — I didn't write a single line of code myself.

Over two weeks, I collaborated closely with Claude Code to identify and fix bugs, smooth the rough edges, and add more features. Through Claude I created the package and its user interface, the website and the documentation, plus a monograph covering the history and the annotated pseudo-code of the program, and finished translating my thesis into English, for good measure.

All of these tasks had languished on my "I wish I had time for this" list for the previous two decades. Claude made them possible in two weeks. Of course, Claude didn't do this alone: I was there, providing the conceptual design and giving detailed instructions, corrections and feedback, as I would to a hired hand. Except this hired hand has genius-level intelligence, knows both programming and circuit theory at an expert level, can code and write far better and much faster than me, and can be hired for a full month for the price of a nice "thank you" dinner.

I'm deeply impressed.