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.

We have members on my team that definitely feel empowered to wade into new territory, but they make so much misdirected code with LLMs, even when we make everyone use Claude 4 thinking agents.

It seems to me that if you have been pattern matching the majority of your coding career, then you have a LLM agent pattern match on top of that, it results in a lot of headaches for people who haven't been doing that on a team.

I think LLM agents are supremely faster at pattern matching than humans, but are not as good at it in general.

> they make so much misdirected code with LLMs

just points to the fact that they've no idea what they're doing and would produce different, pointless code by hand, though much slower. this is the paradigm shift - you need a much bigger sieve to filter out the many more orders of magnitude of crap that inexperienced operators of LLMs create.

It'll be interesting if tools like Claude will end up being used to highlight the people who have no clue what they are doing.

I think you can do this already. If you do not know the underlying concepts, or have no idea about how you have to architecture your project and so forth, then you will have problems with LLMs. So I think many if not most people who have problems with LLMs, it is most likely due to their lack of knowledge and/or their expectation that you can just simply write two sentences and it will figure out what you want and how you want it.

You cannot outsource thinking to LLMs, at least not yet, if ever. You have to be part of the whole process. You need to have knowledge. If you have no idea what it is doing or what you want it to do, you are going to have a difficult time.