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

It's never about lack of work but lack of people who have the prerequisite expertise to do it. If you don't have experience w/ kernel development then no amount of prompting will get you the type of results that the author was able to achieve. More specifically, in theory it should be possible to take all the old drivers & "modernize" them to carry them forward into each new version of the kernel but the problem is that none of the LLMs are capable of doing this work w/o human supervision & the number of people who can actually supervise the LLMs is very small compared to the amount of unmaintained drivers that could be ported into newer kernels.

There is a good discussion/interview¹ between Alan Kay & Joe Armstrong about how most code is developed backwards b/c none of the code has a formal specification that can be "compiled" into different targets. If there was a specification other than the old driver code then the process of porting over the driver would be a matter of recompiling the specification for a new kernel target. In absence of such specification you have to substitute human expertise to make sure the invariants in the old code are maintained in the new one b/c the LLMs has no understanding of any of it other than pattern matching to other drivers w/ similar code.

¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axBVG_VkrHI

There is usually a specification for how hardware works. But:

1. The original hardware spec is usually proprietary, and

2. The spec is often what the hardware was supposed to do. But hardware prototype revisions are expensive. So at some point, the company accepts a bunch of hardware bugs, patches around them in software, ships the hardware, and reassigns the teams to a newer product. The hardware documentation won't always be updated.

This is obviously an awful process, but I've seen and heard of versions of it for over 20 years. The underlying factors driving this can be fixed, if you really want to, but it will make your product totally uncompetitive.

AI doesn’t need to replace a specialist in their entirety for it to tank demand for a skill. If the people that currently do the work are significantly more productive, fewer people will be necessary to the same amount of work. Then, people trying to escape obsolescence in different, more popular specialties move into the niche ones. You could easily pass the threshold of having less work than people without having replaced a single specialist.