This is really neat, I'm glad it worked. This is atrocious C code.
Looks fairly idiomatic. What specifically do you dislike about it?
FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
71–80 of 397 posts
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
GPL is not a patent. It covers the work and _derivatives_; it does not cover ideas or general knowledge. The chip in question has docs. I fully expect that Claude wrote code that does not resemble that of the driver in the Linux tree. TFA is taking on some liability if it turns out that the code Claude wrote does largely resemble GPL'ed code, but if TFA is not comfortable with the code written by Claude not resemblin…
From the file headers:
SPDX-License-Identifier: ISC
Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation
Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors
Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.
I'm going to ahead and say there are copyright law nightmares, right here.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But also -- how do humans do it? There are docs and there's other similar driver code. I wouldn't be surprised if Claude could build new driver code sight-unseen, given the appropriate resources
> 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.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#74Software 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…
eventually people will figure out what is safe to let AI build-and-run without supervision, and what level of problem do you need to actually understand what's under the hood, audit what it does, how to maintain it, etc
I need a way to inventory my vintage video games and my wife's large board game collection. I have some strong opinions, and it's very low risk so I'll probably let Claude build the whole thing, and I'll just run it
Would I do that with something that was keeping track of my finances, ensuring I paid things on time, or ensuring the safety of my house, or driving my car for me? Probably not. For those categories of software since I'm not an expert in those fields, but also it's important that they work and I trust them, I'll prefer software written and maintained by vendors with expertise and a track record in those fields
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#75We'll reverse engineer our way out of planned obsolescence
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only dr…
Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?
I don't see open source as having "competitors". If someone wants to make a fork and use AI to write code (which I also think wouldn't be very useful, as there's no public documentation and everything needs to traced and RE-ed), they are welcome to. We're interested in upstreaming though, which means we need to make sure the origin of code and licence is all compatible and acceptable for mainline, and don't want to infringe on Apple's copyright (which they may enforce on a fork with less strict rules than ours).
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#77I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
Repurposing NDIS drivers is a time honored tradition. No source, but oh well.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#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 proclaim that AI has solved programming. "Ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem"! Or my favourite: instead of software we will just have the LLM output bespoke code for every single computer interaction.
Actually a great article and well worth reading, just ignore the comments because it's clear a lot of people have just read the headline and are reading their own opinions into it.
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#79AI didn't write a driver for him. He ported the Linux driver to FreeBSD with some assistance from an LLM.
What's more interesting to me is the licensing situation when this is done. Does the use of an LLM complicate it? Or is it just a derivative work which can be published under the ISC license [1] as well?
Re: FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
#80Earlier 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...
I know people have done truly amazing things with AI lately, but I feel this in my bones. Almost every demo I see is like, uh, I don't need these extremely simple things in my life automated. I can just go to Delta and buy a plane ticket. I actually want to write my own email to my mom or wife. Of course a demo is just a demo, but also come on