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

I think this is illustrative of the kind of productive things you can do with an LLM if you know what you are doing. Is it perfect, no. Can they do useful things if you prompt correctly, absolutely. It helps knowing what you are doing and having enough skill to make good judgment calls yourself.

There are currently multiple posts per day on HN that escalate into debates on LLMs being useful or not. I think this is a clear example that it can be. And results count. Porting and modernizing some ancient driver is not that easy. There's all sorts of stuff that gets dropped from the kernel because it's just too old to bother maintaining it and when nobody does, deleting code becomes the only option. This is a good example. I imagine, there are enough crusty corners in the kernel that could benefit from a similar treatment.

I've had similar mixed results with agentic coding sometimes impressing me and other times disappointing me. But if you can adapt to some of these limitations it's alright. And this seems to be a bit of a moving goalpost thing as well. Things that were hard a few months ago are now more doable.