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Posted by dmitrybrant 5 days ago

Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver(dmitrybrant.com)
916 points | 319 commentspage 4
fho 5 days ago|
I wonder if the author could now go one step further and wrote some code to interface the take drive with an ESP32, thereby removing the floppy drive from the equation and going straight to USB.
rob_c 5 days ago|
I imagine pull requests are welcome :p
grim_io 4 days ago||
What a great use case.

It demonstrates how much the LLM use can boost productivity on specific tasks where the complete manual implementation would take much longer than the verification.

IshKebab 5 days ago||
> From this point forward, since loading/unloading kernel modules requires sudo, I could no longer let Claude “iterate” on such sensitive operations by itself.

Hilarious! https://xkcd.com/1200/

undebuggable 5 days ago|
Imagine the horror when a random stranger finally installs and sets up that bloody printer on your laptop.
criticalfault 5 days ago||
Would be good to do the same to 'modernize' disassembled drivers for various devices in mobile phones.

Would give postmarketos a boost.

bgwalter 5 days ago||
There is literally a GitHub repository, six years old, that ports an out-of-tree ftape driver to modern Linux:

https://github.com/Godzil/ftape

Could it be that Misanthropic has trained on that one?

lloydatkinson 5 days ago|
> Maybe this driver have problems on SMP machines.

> Maybe this driver have problems on 64Bit x86 machines.

Ouch. The part where it says it’s not possible to use a normal floppy and the tape flip anymore seemed odd enough, but those last points should scare anyone away from trying these on anything important.

bgwalter 5 days ago||
Yes, Godzil's repo could have the issues you point out but still give hints to Claude what APIs to replace. Or the latest possibly-Claude-plagiarized version perhaps has the same issues.
vkaku 5 days ago||
Excellent. This is the kind of W that needs more people to jump into.
MagicMoonlight 5 days ago||
Is Claude code better than ChatGPT?
prameshbajra 5 days ago||
I have been testing both Claude code and Codex CLI for the past few weeks and I found codex output to be better than claude.

I like how Claude code is more advanced in terms of CLI functionality but I prefer Codex output (with model high)

If you do not want to pay for both, then you can pick anyone and go with it. I don't think the difference is huge.

Amadiro 5 days ago||
In my experiments claude4 opus generated by far the best code (for my taste and purposes) but it's also a pretty expensive model. I think I used up $40 in one evening of frantic vibe-coding.
lloydatkinson 5 days ago||
I hope it gets mainlined again!
Keyframe 5 days ago|
pipe dream - now automate Asahi development to M3, M4, and onwards.
mschuster91 5 days ago||
the problem here is that Apple, while at least not standing actively in the way (like console manufacturers), provides zero documentation on how stuff works internally. You gotta reverse-engineer everything, and that either takes at least a dozen highly qualified and thus rare and expensive-to-hire people or someone hard on the autism-hyperfixation spectrum with lots of free time to spare and/or the ability to turn it into an academic project. AI can't help at all here because even if it were able to decompile Apple's driver code, it would not be able to draft a coherent mental model on how things work.

M3, to answer the second part why AI won't be of much help, onwards use a massively different GPU architecture that needs to be worked out, again, from scratch. And all of that while there is a substantial number of subsystems remaining on M1, M2 and its variants that aren't supported at all, only partially supported or with serious workarounds, or where the code quality needs massive work to get upstreamed into Linux.

And on top of that, a number of contributors burned out along the way, some from dealing with the ultra-neckbeard faction amongst Linux kernel developers, some from other mental health issues, and Alyssa departed for Intel recently.

Keyframe 5 days ago||
You mean to tell me those agents aren't PhD-level experts in every field as we were told by OpenAI?? I'm shocked!

Seriously though, it does seem a menial task in itself to reverse engineer what's going on. Would be a really powerful show of force by one of leading AI providers if they setup shop like that to do it in the open.. if they could.

mschuster91 4 days ago||
the menial work used to be decompiling, that can be automated though... but that's maybe 1/3rd of the game. you still need to figure out and observe what happens on what kind of external input. that is for now far beyond the capability of any AI.
flykespice 5 days ago||
How long would the prompt be? Longer than C++ standard specification?
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