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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

#291

Post by kazinator »

jama211 wrote: post #86
abathologist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

Since we invented the tree and control its parameters and features, this is actually correct.

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

#292

Post by kazinator »

jampekka wrote: post #163
jama211 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer. Some amount of boilerplate probably needs to exist, but in general it would be better off minimized. For a decade or so there's sadly been a trend of deliberately increasing it.

Rather, it is boilerplate that replicates hammers along with nails.

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

#293

Post by j45 »

abathologist wrote: post #37
kccqzy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is very true. For the most basic approaches of using stochastic agents for this purpose, especially with genralized agents and approaches.

It is possible to get much higher quality with not just oversight, but creating the alignment from the stochastic agents to have no choice but to converge towards the desired vector of work reliably.

Human in the loop AI is fine, I'm not sure that everything doesn't to be automated, it's entirely possible to get further and more reps in on a problem with the tool as long as the human is the driver and using the stochastic agent as a thinking partner and not the other way around.

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

#294

Post by j45 »

jonstewart wrote: post #225
jama211 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

Carpenters/framers are less skilled and paid less than cabinetmakers. But the world needs more carpenters.

The value is where the demand is, or where the market values it and not just in a skill of working with wood with tools to create nearly anything.

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

#295

Post by j45 »

emilecantin wrote: post #263
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…

One area where it really shines for me is personal projects. You know, the type of projects you might get to spend a couple hours on once the kids are in bed... Spending that couple hours guiding Claude do do what I want is way quicker than doing it all myself. Especially since I do have the skills to do it all myself, just not the time. It's been particularly effective around UI stuff since I've selected a popular U…

Totally. Being able to start shipping from the first commit using something like Picocss and just add features helps gets things out of the design stage, but shipping features individually.

Some folks seem to like Docker Swarm before kubernetes as well and I've found it's not bad for personal projects for sure.

AI will always return the average of it's corpus given the chance (or not clear direction in the prompt). I usually let my opinions rip and say to avoid building myself a stack temple to my greatness. It often comes back with a nice lean stack.

I usually avoid or minimize Javascript libraries for their brittleness, and the complexity can eat up more of the AI's context and awareness to map the abstractions vs something it knows incredibly well.

Python is great, but web stuff is still emerging, FastAPI is handy though, and putting something like Pico/HTMX/alpine.js on the front seems reasonable.

Laravel is also really hard to overlook sometimes when working with LLMs on quick things, there's so much working code out there that it can really get a ton done for an entire production environment with all of the built in tools.

Happy to learn about what other folks are using and liking.

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

#296

Post by tankenmate »

utyop22 wrote: post #167
jxf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything we do is a stochastic process. If you throw a dart 100 times at a target, it's not going to land at the same spot every time. There is a great deal of uncertainty and non-deterministic behavior in our everyday actions.

Go say this to a darts player who has hit a 9 darter….. Actually no wait let’s expand it. Why not go say this to Ronnie O’Sullivan too! The way you’re describing is such that there is no determinism behind what is being done. Simply not true.

a stochastic system can can deterministic sub-parts, a deterministic system cannot have stochastic sub-parts.

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

#297

Post by mexicocitinluez »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #235
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more you use the tools, the more you're able to recognize the situations in which they're useful. These studies keep popping up where they randomly decide whether someone will use AI to assist in a feature or not and it's hard for me to explain just how stupid that is. And how it's a fundamental misunderstanding of when and how you'd want to use these tools. It's like being a person who hangs up drywall with scre…

> I don't use it to create entire features. I actually do this now. That's one of those things that went from impossible to doable under some circumstances. Still a bit of a coin flip but it can work well in some code bases. I still have a mental block even asking for these things under the assumption it would not work anyway. But I've been pleasantly surprised a few times where this actually works.

I sorta mispoke. I use Bolt to create UI designs for entire features, but write the back-end code by hand (with Copilot as Autocomplete).

Honestly amazed at how good it is getting something going. I always had issues extrapolating on existing designs, so the ability to get EXACT screens built without having a designer yell at me for being stupid has been a godsend.

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

#298

Post by utyop22 »

tankenmate wrote: post #296
utyop22 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go say this to a darts player who has hit a 9 darter….. Actually no wait let’s expand it. Why not go say this to Ronnie O’Sullivan too! The way you’re describing is such that there is no determinism behind what is being done. Simply not true.

a stochastic system can can deterministic sub-parts, a deterministic system cannot have stochastic sub-parts.

Theres nothing stochastic about a human that hits a 147 mate nor a 9 darter mate. I cant believe people seriously post this nonsense.

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

#299

Post by coldtea »

jama211 wrote: post #86
abathologist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

I can tell you about 1000 ways, the problem is there are no corporate monetary incentives to follow them, and not much late-90s-era FOSS ethos going around either...

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

#300

Post by coldtea »

jampekka wrote: post #163
jama211 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer. Some amount of boilerplate probably needs to exist, but in general it would be better off minimized. For a decade or so there's sadly been a trend of deliberately increasing it.

>Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer

It's rather saying that we should have parts that join without nailing by now, especially for things we do again and again and again and again.

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