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

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.

Yes. The author essentially asked Claude to port a driver from Linux 2.4 to Linux 6.8. Very certainly there must be sufficient amounts of training material, and web-searchable material, that describes such tasks. The author provided his own expertise where Claude could not find a good analogue in the training corpus, that is, the few actually non-trivial bits of porting.

"Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills" is a great way to formulate it. If your own skills in the area are near-zero, multiplying them by a large factor may still yield a near-zero result. (And negative productivity.)

You can still ask, generate a list of things to learn etc. basically generate a streamlined course based on all tutorials, readmes and source code available when the model was trained. You can call your tutor 24/7 as long as you got tokens.