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

(dmitrybrant.com)
925 points dmitrybrant | 1 comments | 07 Sep 25 23:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.266s | source
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theptip ◴[08 Sep 25 00:17 UTC] No.45163517[source]▶
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 also a boon at big tech companies where there are just lots of tech stacks and frameworks in use.

I feel there is an interesting split forming in ability to gauge AI capabilities - it kinda requires you to be on top of a rapidly-changing firehose of techniques and frameworks. If you haven’t spent 100 hours with Claude Code / Claude 4.0 you likely don’t have an accurate picture of its capabilities.

“Enables non-coders to vibe code their way into trouble” might be the median scenario on X, but it’s not so relevant to what expert coders will experience if they put the time in.

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bicx ◴[08 Sep 25 00:36 UTC] No.45163642[source]▶
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 having CC often one-shot a great UI for internal tools.

Being able to think at a higher level beyond grunt work and framework nuances is a game-changer for my career of 16 years.

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kccqzy ◴[08 Sep 25 01:31 UTC] No.45163945[source]▶
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 and grunt work?
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1. mikepurvis ◴[08 Sep 25 02:16 UTC] No.45164135[source]▶
I feel this some days, but honestly I’m not sure it’s the whole answer. Every piece of code has some purpose or expresses a decision point in a design, and when you “abstract” away those decisions, they don’t usually go away — often they’re just hidden in a library or base class, or become a matter of convention.

Python’s subprocess for example has a lot of args and that reflects the reality that creating processes is finicky and there a lot of subtly different ways to do it. Getting an llm to understand your use case and create a subprocess call for you is much more realistic than imagining some future version of subprocess where the options are just magically gone and it knows what to do or we’ve standardized on only one way to do it and one thing that happens with the pipes and one thing for the return code and all the rest of it.