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

When I read an article like this it makes me think about how the demand for work to be done was nowhere close to being fully supplied by the pre-LLM status quo.

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