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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: 0s | source
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meander_water ◴[08 Sep 25 02:53 UTC] No.45164266[source]▶
> Be as specific as possible, making sure to use the domain-specific keywords for the task.

If you don't have the technical understanding of a language or framework, there is going to be a lot of ambiguity in your prompts.

This specificity gap leads the LLM to fill in those gaps for you, which may not be what you intended. And that's usually where bugs hide.

I think this is the flip side to being a "force multiplier"

replies(1): >>45164416 #
SV_BubbleTime ◴[08 Sep 25 03:32 UTC] No.45164416[source]▶
“I need a C class that has a constructor for a tuple”

I would hope Claude would be like “Hold on man…”

replies(3): >>45164566 #>>45164790 #>>45168017 #
1. qayxc ◴[08 Sep 25 05:05 UTC] No.45164790[source]▶
Hm. That was interesting, so I ran it as prompt to Qwen3-Coder (which I run locally). It spat out a bunch of C functions together with a C struct and commented:

  This implementation provides:
  Generic Tuple Structure: A flexible tuple that can hold different types of elements (int, double, string, float)
  Constructor Function: tuple_create() initializes a new tuple with specified size
  Type-Safe Setters:
    tuple_set_int(), tuple_set_double(), tuple_set_string(), tuple_set_float()
  Type-Safe Getters:
    tuple_get_int(), tuple_get_double(), tuple_get_string(), tuple_get_float()
  Memory Management: Automatic memory allocation and deallocation
  Utility Functions:
   tuple_print() for displaying tuple contents
   tuple_destroy() for cleanup
Seems to be a common enough request to be present in the model's training data :D Even the code looked fine, apart from being a very naive and thus slow implementation.