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

(dmitrybrant.com)
925 points dmitrybrant | 3 comments | 07 Sep 25 23:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.239s | 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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1. not_that_d ◴[08 Sep 25 07:36 UTC] No.45165556[source]▶
For me is not so. It makes me way faster in languages that I don't know, but makes me slower on the ones I know because a lot of times, it creates code that will fail eventually.

Then I need to expend extra time following everything it did so I can "fix" the problem.

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2. peteforde ◴[08 Sep 25 10:51 UTC] No.45166760[source]▶
My daily experience suggests that this happens primarily when the developer isn't as good as they assume that they are at expressing the ideas in their head into a structure that the LLM can run with. That's not intended to be a jab, just an opportunity for reflection.
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3. skydhash ◴[08 Sep 25 11:50 UTC] No.45167162[source]▶
But the moment I got the idea in my head, is the moment I got the code for it. The time spent is moslty checking the library semantics, or if there’s not some function already written for a specific bit. There’s also checking if you’re not violating some contract somewhere.

A lot of people have the try and see if it works approach. That can be insanely wasteful in any moderately complex system. The scientist way is to have a model that reduce the system to a few parameters. Then you’ll see that a lot of libraries are mostly surface works and slighlty modified version of the same thing.