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FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

vladimir.varank.in

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Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#101

Post by Gigachad »

dumbfounder wrote: post #65

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#102

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

> The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

And it's incredible that they got a somewhat working wifi driver given just how little effort they put in.

I have no doubt that a motivated person with domain knowledge trying to make a robust community driver for unsupported hardware could absolutely accomplish this in a fraction of the time and would be good quality.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#103

Post by slopinthebag »

petcat wrote: post #91
slopinthebag wrote: post #78

> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise. Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and…

The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with. Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

> The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with.

Yes and that's what I'm pointing out, they vibe coded it and the headline is somewhat misleading, although it's not the authors fault if you don't go read the article before commenting.

But it does have to do with AI (obviously), and specifically the capabilities of AI. If you need to be knowledgable about how wifi drivers work and put in effort to get a decent result, that obviously speaks volumes about the capabilities of the vibe coding approach.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#104

Post by acedTrex »

petcat wrote: post #91
slopinthebag wrote: post #78

> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise. Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and…

The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with. Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

> Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

The part to do with AI is that it was not able to drive a comprehensive and bug free driver with minimal effort from the human.

That is the point.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#105

Post by kami23 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #70
tkiolp4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…

Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets. Like what are we even doing here...

Why would I do that if the gateway to the internet becomes these LLM interfaces? How is it not easier to ask or type 'buy me tickets for Les Mis'? In the ideal world it will just figure it out, or I frustratingly have to interact with a slightly different website to purchase tickets for each separate event I want to see.

One of the benefits that I see is as much as I love tech and writing software, I really really do not want to interface with a vast majority of the internet that has been designed to show the maximum amount of ads in the given ad space.

The internet sucks now, anything that gets me away from having ads shoved in my face constantly and surrounded by uncertainty that you could always be talking to a bot.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#106

Post by slopinthebag »

jacobr1 wrote: post #73
slopinthebag wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also -- how do humans do it? Probably a mix of critical thinking, thinking from first principles, etc. You know, all things that LLM's are not capable of.

Except it often is the case that when you break down what humans are doing, there are actual concrete tasks. If you can convert the tacit knowledge to decision trees and background references, you likely can get the AI to perform most non-creative tasks.

If you have to hold the LLM's hand to accomplish a task, using human intelligence to do so, you can't consider the task performed by AI.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#107

Post by petcat »

slopinthebag wrote: post #103
petcat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with. Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.

> The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with. Yes and that's what I'm pointing out, they vibe coded it and the headline is somewhat misleading, although it's not the authors fault if you don't go read the article before commenting. But it does have to do with AI (obviously), and specificall…

I strongly suspect that somebody with domain knowledge around Wi-Fi drivers and OS kernel drivers could prompt the llm to spit out a lot more robust code than this guy was able to. That's not a knock on him, he was just trying to see what he could do. It's impressive what he actually accomplished given how little effort he put forth and how little knowledge he had about the subject.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#108

Post by Vegenoid »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #51
tkiolp4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…

This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly? Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself

> If the behavior of the system is specified well enough

Then it becomes code: a precise symbolic representation of a process that can be unambiguously interpreted by a computer. If there is ambiguity, then that will be unsuitable for many systems.

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#109

Post by whackernews »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #29
ulf-77723 wrote: post #13

Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make use of this software without caution as expressed in the article. For most people the main difference will be: Will it run and solve my problem? Soon we will see malware being put into vibe coded software - who will wants to check every commit for write-only sof…

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same…

Aren’t we kinda realising that disposable/throwaway stuff is, like, bad? Why do we have to go down this wasteful and hyper-consumptive route AGAIN. Can we try and see the patterns here and move forwards?

Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

#110

Post by slopinthebag »

kami23 wrote: post #105
slopinthebag wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets. Like what are we even doing here...

Why would I do that if the gateway to the internet becomes these LLM interfaces? How is it not easier to ask or type 'buy me tickets for Les Mis'? In the ideal world it will just figure it out, or I frustratingly have to interact with a slightly different website to purchase tickets for each separate event I want to see. One of the benefits that I see is as much as I love tech and writing software, I really really do…

I'm sympathetic to this view too, but I don't think the solution is to have LLM's generate bespoke code to do it. We absolutely should be using them for more natural language interfaces tho.
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