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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

#341

Post by ang_cire »

tclancy wrote: post #232
secbear wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software

Yes, but this is the honeymoon period. A year from now when you want to make three of the tools talk to each other and they're in three different languages, two of which you don't know and there's no common interface or good place to put one, well, here's hoping you hung onto the design documents.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I've been making lots of my 'vibe-coded' tools interoperable already.

My assumption is that eventually the VC-backed gravy train of low-cost good-quality LLM compute is going to dry-up, and I'm going to have to make do with what I got out of them.

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

#342

Post by veunes »

Spot on about keeping that AGENTS.md and logging all decisions. Letting an agent code for a long stretch without pinning down the state is a surefire way to end up with a Frankenstein codebase. Forcing it to document why you ditched LinuxKPI and went native basically saved the project. It's kinda ironic that AI is making us enforce strict project documentation - the exact thing human devs never have time for

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

#343

Post by veunes »

snowhale wrote: post #64
octoberfranklin wrote: post #21

That AI was trained on the GPLv2 Linux source code, which does have a driver for your Wi-Fi. How is this not copyright laundering?

[dead]

I wouldn't call this "clean-room". The models were trained on all available open source, including that exact original Linux driver. Splitting sessions saves you from direct copy-paste in the current context window, but the weights themselves remember the internal code structure perfectly well. Lawyers still have to rack their brains over this, but for now, it looks more like license laundering through the neural net's latent space than true reverse engineering

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

#344

Post by veunes »

irishcoffee wrote: post #145
cryptonector wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a sample you think is particularly bad?

Throwing myself to the sharks here, but sure. pcie.c /* * BAR0 register access */ uint32_t brcmf_reg_read(struct brcmf_softc *sc, uint32_t off) { return (bus_space_read_4(sc->reg_bst, sc->reg_bsh, off)); } Is sc null? Who knows! Was it memset anywhere? No! Were any structs memset anywhere? Barely! Does this codebase check for null? Maybe in 3% of the places it should! All throughout this codebase variables are declar…

To be fair if you open up driver source code from the vendors themselves, it's often the same hell with magic numbers and lack of checks because "we know what the hardware will return". But you're right on the main point: AI writes C like a very confident junior who skipped memory safety lectures - it copies the style, but not the discipline. It works as long as you're on the "happy path", but debugging a kernel panic in code like that is going to be painful

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

#346

Post by veunes »

fdefitte wrote: post #273

[dead]

He had the full source code of a working Linux driver that does exactly the same thing, just in a neighboring kernel dialect. The task was to translate, not invent. Sure, it's still impressive (given the difference in kernel APIs), but it's not the same as writing a driver from scratch using only a PDF datasheet. Now, when an AI takes an undocumented Chinese chip and writes a driver by sniffing the bus with a logic analyzer - then I'll call it "reasoning"

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

#347

Post by reactordev »

ang_cire wrote: post #340
reactordev wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we've seen what "no barrier of entry" marketplaces look like... Quality go down.

That is only true at the start. The quality will always be lower for a new product/ production line, because 1) it hasn't had the time to iterate that got the established, big-name producers to where they are, and 2) it democratizes the market to allow for lower-quality version that weren't fiscally feasible under a more complex (and thus expensive) manufacturing/ production base. But after the market normalizes, it…

Thus creating a concentration on which is the best personal Google clone and thus, creating another Google. Walled paywall and all. It’s a cycle.

Free and open marketplace, crapware. Crapware for long enough, goodware. Goodware so good, it needs hardware, it needs integrations, it solves world hunger, but no one uses anything else anymore.

No, the best are marketplaces that are open but moderated for quality.

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

#349

Post by red-iron-pine »

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.

why would F500 FAANG type orgs ever want the consumer to create their own software?

how will stock prices rise, outside of the one holder of the AI?

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

#350

Post by bmurphy1976 »

pjmlp wrote: post #310
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today. We'll be right back here in no-time.

No we won't, that was our hope when software development experience started going downhill with cheap offshoring teams. The best we could achieve were the projects that got so burned that near shore started to become an alternative, but never again in-house.

I really don't understand your reply. What exactly are you disagreeing with?
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