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Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

dmitrybrant.com

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Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#31

Post by nine_k »

theptip wrote: post #3

A good case study. I have found these two to be good categories of win: > Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. Claude definitely makes me more productive in frameworks I know well, where I can scan and pattern-match quickly on the boilerplate parts. > Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. I’m also more productive here, this is an enabler to explore new areas, and is al…

Yes. The author essentially asked Claude to port a driver from Linux 2.4 to Linux 6.8. Very certainly there must be sufficient amounts of training material, and web-searchable material, that describes such tasks. The author provided his own expertise where Claude could not find a good analogue in the training corpus, that is, the few actually non-trivial bits of porting.

"Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills" is a great way to formulate it. If your own skills in the area are near-zero, multiplying them by a large factor may still yield a near-zero result. (And negative productivity.)

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#32

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

theptip wrote: post #3

A good case study. I have found these two to be good categories of win: > Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. Claude definitely makes me more productive in frameworks I know well, where I can scan and pattern-match quickly on the boilerplate parts. > Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. I’m also more productive here, this is an enabler to explore new areas, and is al…

We have members on my team that definitely feel empowered to wade into new territory, but they make so much misdirected code with LLMs, even when we make everyone use Claude 4 thinking agents.

It seems to me that if you have been pattern matching the majority of your coding career, then you have a LLM agent pattern match on top of that, it results in a lot of headaches for people who haven't been doing that on a team.

I think LLM agents are supremely faster at pattern matching than humans, but are not as good at it in general.

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#33

Post by yeasku »

squeakywhite wrote: post #29
yeasku wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The post was created to show how AI helped this person solve their particular problem - which it appeared to do successfully. Other people commenting about AI hype on the post isn't an indication that the post itself was created to hype AI, or that that the post itself is "bad".

[flagged]

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#34

Post by konfusinomicon »

tedk-42 wrote: post #17

Really is an exciting future ahead. So many lost arts that don't need a dedicated human to relearn deep knowledge required to make an update. A reminder though these LLM calls cost energy and we need reliable power generation to iterate through this next tech cycle. Hopefully all that useless crypto wasted clock cycle burn is going to LLM clock cycle burn :)

yes they do! those are the humans that pass down those lost arts even if the audience is a handful. to trust an amalgamation of neurally organized binary carved intricately into metal with deep and often arcane knowledge and the lineage of lessons that produced it is so absurd that if a catastrophe that destroyed life as we know it did occur, we deserve our fate of devolution back to stone tools and such.

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#35

Post by anyfoo »

yeasku wrote: post #25
geor9e wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors using it. You're implying software created solely to fulfill one persons desires is a bad thing.

[flagged]

I don't think the author is in the camp of unconditionally hyping AI: https://dmitrybrant.com/2023/03/25/artificial-stupidity

Even without that other article, this really reads like the author tried it for menial tasks on a neat passion project, and reports his success on it. (I'm a kernel developer, so I can empathize.)

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#36

Post by anyfoo »

yeasku wrote: post #33
squeakywhite wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post was created to show how AI helped this person solve their particular problem - which it appeared to do successfully. Other people commenting about AI hype on the post isn't an indication that the post itself was created to hype AI, or that that the post itself is "bad".

[flagged]

> I said nobody will use the driver. But I am terrible wrong because one person will?

Yes? The person who needs it is using it. Other people who need it (anyone who wants to archive tapes of that kind) now can, too.

> Second, another post on hackernews about how AI helps you code is not AI hype?

Do you think it was written with the intent to specifically hype AI, rather than to report on a passion project?

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#37

Post by abathologist »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
bicx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good takeaway. I use Claude Code as my main approach for making changes to a codebase, and I’ve been doing so every day for months. I have a solid system I follow through trial and error, and overall it’s been a massive boon to my productivity and willingness to attempt larger experiments. One thing I love doing is developing a strong underlying data structure, schema, and internal API, then essentially hav…

This is more of a reflection of how our profession has not meaningfully advanced. OP talks about boilerplate. You talk about grunt work. We now have AI to do these things for us. But why do such things need to exist in the first place? Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment? Why haven't we collectively emphasized the creation of new tools to reduce boilerplate a…

This is the glaring fallacy! We are turning to unreliable stochastic agents to churn out boilerplate and do toil that should just be abstracted or automated away by fully deterministic, reliably correct programs. This is, prima facie, a degenerative and wasteful way to develop software.

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#38

Post by [deleted] »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
bicx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good takeaway. I use Claude Code as my main approach for making changes to a codebase, and I’ve been doing so every day for months. I have a solid system I follow through trial and error, and overall it’s been a massive boon to my productivity and willingness to attempt larger experiments. One thing I love doing is developing a strong underlying data structure, schema, and internal API, then essentially hav…

This is more of a reflection of how our profession has not meaningfully advanced. OP talks about boilerplate. You talk about grunt work. We now have AI to do these things for us. But why do such things need to exist in the first place? Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment? Why haven't we collectively emphasized the creation of new tools to reduce boilerplate a…

[deleted]

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#39

Post by anyfoo »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
bicx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good takeaway. I use Claude Code as my main approach for making changes to a codebase, and I’ve been doing so every day for months. I have a solid system I follow through trial and error, and overall it’s been a massive boon to my productivity and willingness to attempt larger experiments. One thing I love doing is developing a strong underlying data structure, schema, and internal API, then essentially hav…

This is more of a reflection of how our profession has not meaningfully advanced. OP talks about boilerplate. You talk about grunt work. We now have AI to do these things for us. But why do such things need to exist in the first place? Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment? Why haven't we collectively emphasized the creation of new tools to reduce boilerplate a…

Because people think learning Haskell is too hard.

Re: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

#40

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

kccqzy wrote: post #30
bicx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good takeaway. I use Claude Code as my main approach for making changes to a codebase, and I’ve been doing so every day for months. I have a solid system I follow through trial and error, and overall it’s been a massive boon to my productivity and willingness to attempt larger experiments. One thing I love doing is developing a strong underlying data structure, schema, and internal API, then essentially hav…

This is more of a reflection of how our profession has not meaningfully advanced. OP talks about boilerplate. You talk about grunt work. We now have AI to do these things for us. But why do such things need to exist in the first place? Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment? Why haven't we collectively emphasized the creation of new tools to reduce boilerplate a…

> Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment?

There are? For example, rails has had boilerplate generation commands for a couple of decades.

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