> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise.
Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and proclaim that AI has solved programming. "Ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem"! Or my favourite: instead of software we will just have the LLM output bespoke code for every single computer interaction.
Actually a great article and well worth reading, just ignore the comments because it's clear a lot of people have just read the headline and are reading their own opinions into it.
The hype people are excited because they're guessing where it's going.
This is notable because it's a milestone that was not previously possible: a driver that works, from someone who spent ~zero effort learning the hardware or driver programming themselves.
It's not production ready, but neither is the first working version of anything. Do you see any reason that progress will stop abruptly here?
> Do you see any reason progress will stop abruptly here?
Yeah, money and energy. And fundamental limitations of LLM's. I mean, I'm obviously guessing as well because I'm not an expert, but it's a view shared by some of the biggest experts in the field ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just don't really buy the idea that we're going to have near-infinite linear or exponential progress until we reach AGI. Reality rarely works like that.
The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with.
Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
> The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with.
Yes and that's what I'm pointing out, they vibe coded it and the headline is somewhat misleading, although it's not the authors fault if you don't go read the article before commenting.
But it does have to do with AI (obviously), and specifically the capabilities of AI. If you need to be knowledgable about how wifi drivers work and put in effort to get a decent result, that obviously speaks volumes about the capabilities of the vibe coding approach.
> The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
Aren't you just describing every vibe code ever?
To think about it, that is probably my main issue with AI art/books etc. They never put in any effort. In fact, even the competition is about putting least effort.
> instead of software we will just have the LLM output bespoke code for every single computer interaction.
That's sort of the idea behind GPU upscaling: You increase gaming performance and visual sharpness by rendering games at lower resolutions and use algorithms to upscale to the monitor's native resolution. Somehow cheaper than actually rendering at high resolution: Let the GPU hallucinate the difference at a lower cost.
> Instead of continuing with the code, I spawned a fresh Pi session, and asked the agent to write a detailed specification of how the brcmfmac driver works
Planning markdown files are critical for any large LLM task.
The line between AI-assisted clean-room reverse-engineeing and open-source-license-laundering is a thin one, and I think the one described in the article crosses over to laundering. In classic clean-room design, one team documents the interfaces - not the code.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
He also mentioned it took 2 months. I’m actually wondering how long it would take to do the Linux to BSD port by eyeball, or at least ai assisted. Probably not that much longer? I guess it depends on wall time vs real time.
True. But also -- how do humans do it? There are docs and there's other similar driver code. I wouldn't be surprised if Claude could build new driver code sight-unseen, given the appropriate resources
Just like it does when given an existing GPL’d source and dealing with its hallucinations, the agent could be operated on a black box (or a binary Windows driver and a disassembly)?
The GPL code helped here but as long as the agent can run in a loop and test its work against a piece of hardware, I don’t see why it couldn’t do the same without any code given enough time?
GPL is not a patent. It covers the work and _derivatives_; it does not cover ideas or general knowledge. The chip in question has docs.
I fully expect that Claude wrote code that does not resemble that of the driver in the Linux tree. TFA is taking on some liability if it turns out that the code Claude wrote does largely resemble GPL'ed code, but if TFA is not comfortable with the code written by Claude not resembling existing GPL'ed code then they can just post their prompts and everyone who needs this driver can go through the process of getting Claude to code it.
In court TFA would be a defendant, so TFA needs to be sure enough that the code in question does not resemble GPL'ed code. Here in the court of public opinion I'd say that claims of GPL violation need to be backed up by a serious similarity analysis.
Prompts cannot possibly be considered derivatives of the GPL'ed code that Claude might mimic.
Maybe one day, but it doesn't look like we are very close yet. From the OP article, they handed it the working linux driver and asked it to just make this FreeBSD compatible, but it could not. Looks like it took OP a significant amount of work over 2 months to get something that seems to work.
What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading, etc.
> What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading, etc.
That's how I've been using the bot for years. Organize tasks, mediate between them, look for obvious-to-me problems and traps as things progress, and provide corrections where that seems useful.
It differs from regular management, I think, in that the sunk costs are never very significant.
Find a design issue that requires throwing out big chunks of work? No problem: Just change that part of the spec and run through the process for that and the stuff beneath it again. These parts cost approximately nothing to produce the first time through, and they'll still cost approximately nothing to produce the second time.
I'm not building a physical structure here, nor am I paying salaries or waiting days or weeks to refactor: If the foundation is wrong, then just nuke it and start over fresh. Clean slates are cheap.
(I don't know if that's the right way to do it, or the wrong way. But it works -- for me, at least, with the things I want to get done with a computer.)
To make these things work you do need to write a spec and figure out what unit tests will prove it actually did what you want. Even then it will take a bunch of shortcuts so it's best if you're a domain expert anyway.
Drivers can be anywhere from so trivial you can throw it together by hand in an afternoon to so complex that it requires an entire engineering team six months of concentrated effort.
> We're very close to just being about to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything.
That sounds quite naive and it isn't that simple. Even the author expressed caution and isn't sure about how robust the driver is since he hasn't seen the code himself nor does he know if it works reliably.
Even entertaining the idea, someone would have already have replaced those closed source Nvidia drivers that have firmware blobs and other drivers that have firmware blobs to be open replacements. (Yes Nouveau exists, but at the disadvantage of not performing as well as the closed source driver)
> We're very close to just being about to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything.
This is false. To "brute force" a driver, you'd need a feedback loop between the hardware's output and the driver's input.
While, in theory, this is possible for some analog-digital traducers (e.g WI-FI radio), if the hardware is a human-interface system (joystick, monitor, mouse, speaker, etc.) you literally need a "human in the loop" to provide feedback.
Additionally, many edge-cases in driving hardware can irrevocably destroy it and even a domain-specific agent wouldn't have any physics context for the underlying risks.
I'm not so sure that Nouveau is slower than the proprietary Nvidia driver. I didn't run benchmarks on my personal use case but my subjective experience is that Nouveau might be faster. It's a Debian 11, X11, NVIDIA driver vs Debian 13, X11, Nouveau on the same laptop with a Quadro K1100mq. The desktop of the newer system seems to be faster. Of course it could be the sum of the individual improvements of kernel, GNOME, etc. I only move windows around my desktop, no games, so it's a very limited scenario.
someone would have already have replaced those closed source Nvidia drivers that have firmware blobs
This isn’t quite a fair example, these are so massively complex with code path built explicitly for so many individual applications. Nvidia cards are nearly a complete SoC.
Though then again, coding agents 1 year ago of the full autonomous sort were barely months old, and now here we are in one year. So, maybe soon this could be realistic? Hard to say. Even if code agents can do it, it still costs $ via tokens and api calls. But a year ago it would have cost me at least a few dollars and a lot more time to do things I get done now in a prompt and 10 minutes of Opus in a sandbox.
I've thought for a while now that we'll end up moving to stricter languages that have safer concurrency, etc, partly for this reason. The most prominent resistance against such languages was the learning curve, but humans like OP aren't looking at the code now.
Had an experience like this recently. QEMU stopped compiling for old versions of MacOS (pre-13) w/M1 arch, due to it requiring newer SDKs which don't support older MacOS versions. I put Sonnet 4.6 on the case, and it wrote a small patch, compiled and installed it in a matter of minutes, without giving it any instructions other than to look at errors and apply a fix. I definitely would have just given up without the AI.
The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.
Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not
My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want
This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.
Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make use of this software without caution as expressed in the article.
For most people the main difference will be: Will it run and solve my problem? Soon we will see malware being put into vibe coded software - who will wants to check every commit for write-only software?
I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code.
If I want to buy more tickets the same day, the ai agent will likely reuse the same code. But if i buy tickets again in one year, the agent will likely rebuild the code to adjust to the new API version the ticket company now offers.
Seems wasteful but it’s more dynamic. Vendors only need to provide raw APIs and your agent can create the ui experience you want. In that regard nobody but the company that owns your agent can inject malware into the software you use. Some software will last more than others (e.g., the music player your agent provided won’t probably be rebuilt unless you want a new look and feel or extra functionality). I think we’ll adopt the “cattle, not pets” approach to software too.
Aren’t we kinda realising that disposable/throwaway stuff is, like, bad? Why do we have to go down this wasteful and hyper-consumptive route AGAIN. Can we try and see the patterns here and move forwards?
This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly?
Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself
eventually people will figure out what is safe to let AI build-and-run without supervision, and what level of problem do you need to actually understand what's under the hood, audit what it does, how to maintain it, etc
I need a way to inventory my vintage video games and my wife's large board game collection. I have some strong opinions, and it's very low risk so I'll probably let Claude build the whole thing, and I'll just run it
Would I do that with something that was keeping track of my finances, ensuring I paid things on time, or ensuring the safety of my house, or driving my car for me? Probably not. For those categories of software since I'm not an expert in those fields, but also it's important that they work and I trust them, I'll prefer software written and maintained by vendors with expertise and a track record in those fields
This is exactly why I built SkillForge (skillforge.expert) - to capture and reuse expertise. You effectively taught an AI your Wi-Fi knowledge by recording your workflow. We do the same for browser automation: record your screen, extract reusable agent skills. 50 free credits if you want to try it out.
It used an existing implementation, in theory this was mostly a porting task.
GPL-wise, I don't know how much is inspiration vs "based on" would this be, it'd be interesting to compare.
This looks like my Company peers, as long as there is any existing implementation they are pretty confident they can deliver, poor suckers that do the "no one has done it before" first pass don't get any recognition.
AI wouldn't work here. The OP task was converting one open source driver in to another one for FreeBSD. Since Mac doesn't have open source drivers to start with, a person still has to do the ground research. At least until you can somehow give the AI the ability to fully interact with the computer at the lowest levels and observe hardware connected to it.
We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only drivers in the same subsystems) but we wish to use GPL+MIT to enable BSD to take inspiration from the drivers.
Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?
Your LICENSE file reminds me that the copyright status of LLM-generated code remains absolutely uncharted waters and it's not clear that you can in fact legally license this under ISC
> The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
And it's incredible that they got a somewhat working wifi driver given just how little effort they put in.
I have no doubt that a motivated person with domain knowledge trying to make a robust community driver for unsupported hardware could absolutely accomplish this in a fraction of the time and would be good quality.
AI didn't write a driver for him. He ported the Linux driver to FreeBSD with some assistance from an LLM.
What's more interesting to me is the licensing situation when this is done. Does the use of an LLM complicate it? Or is it just a derivative work which can be published under the ISC license [1] as well?
the spec-first approach is actually the historical clean-room technique, same way Phoenix BIOS was legally written without copyright exposure in the 80s -- one team writes spec from observation, completely separate team codes from spec only, no shared authors. here it's AI doing both passes but in different sessions with no shared context, which approximates the same separation. probably good enough legally but definitely interesting that the same old trick applies.
You haven't addressed the parent's concern at all, which is that what the LLM was trained on, not what was fed into its context window. The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.
Also, the "spec" that the LLM wrote to simulate the "clean-room" technique is full of C code from the Linux driver.
An impressively softwarey alternative to simply pulling out the wifi module and replacing it with an AliExpress Apple wifi module adapter board and a compact M.2 WiFi module with a supported chipset :)
The DNS name has both Russian and Indian in it, and its about vibe coding and AI to make system level software which can access the plaintext of my app comms: nope, nope, nope, nope and oh hell no.
Is sc null? Who knows! Was it memset anywhere? No! Were any structs memset anywhere? Barely! Does this codebase check for null? Maybe in 3% of the places it should!
All throughout this codebase variables are declared and not initialized. Magic numbers are everywhere AND constants are defined everywhere. Constants are a mix of hex and int for what seem to be completely arbitrary reasons. Error handling is completely inconsistent, sometimes a function will return 5 places, sometimes a function will set an error code and jump to a label, and sometimes do both in the same function depending on which branch it hits.
All of this is the kind of code smell I would ask someone to justify and most likely rework.
Or I'm just a dumbass, I suppose I'll find out shortly.
The Linux community has been doing this since forever.
Old hardware is fully supported on Linux, unless of course, you are a macOS fanboy because Apple will do everything to preventing you from owning your hardware, including locking hardware ID via firmware.
I don’t think Apple is any different than any other vendor who doesn’t bother releasing Linux drivers? support for most devices depends on the community creating them no?
If you’re a macOS fanboy presumably you don’t care about Linux support.
>I don’t think Apple is any different than any other vendor
Read my previous comment again!!
If you buy a genuine display and install it, it won't work because Apple locks the hardware ID via firmware.
It must be installed by Apple only.
No other vendor does that, the Linux community always found its way to get a non-supported hardware working.
Windows until recently with the AI slope, was the only major OS used everywhere so why many vendors only have Windows driver, I understand theirs "Why bother?"
> I didn’t write any piece of code there. There are several known issues, which I will task the agent to resolve, eventually. Meanwhile, I strongly advise against using it for anything beyond a studying exercise.
Months of effort and three separate tries to get something kind of working but which is buggy and untested and not recommended for anyone to use, but unfortunately some folks will just read the headline and proclaim that AI has solved programming. "Ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem"! Or my favourite: instead of software we will just have the LLM output bespoke code for every single computer interaction.
Actually a great article and well worth reading, just ignore the comments because it's clear a lot of people have just read the headline and are reading their own opinions into it.
You're validly critiquing where it is now.
The hype people are excited because they're guessing where it's going.
This is notable because it's a milestone that was not previously possible: a driver that works, from someone who spent ~zero effort learning the hardware or driver programming themselves.
It's not production ready, but neither is the first working version of anything. Do you see any reason that progress will stop abruptly here?
Not a huge fan of @sama, but he is quoted as saying: this is the worst these models will every be!
Puts all criticism in a new perspective.
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> Do you see any reason progress will stop abruptly here?
Yeah, money and energy. And fundamental limitations of LLM's. I mean, I'm obviously guessing as well because I'm not an expert, but it's a view shared by some of the biggest experts in the field ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just don't really buy the idea that we're going to have near-infinite linear or exponential progress until we reach AGI. Reality rarely works like that.
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The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with.
Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
> Nothing to do with AI, or even the capabilities of AI. The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
The part to do with AI is that it was not able to drive a comprehensive and bug free driver with minimal effort from the human.
That is the point.
Seems like they did put in quite a bit of effort, but were not knowledgeable enough on wifi drivers to go further.
So hardware drivers are not a solved problem where you can just ask chatgpt for a driver and it spits one out for you.
> The author specifically said that they did not read the code or even test the output very thoroughly. It was intentionally just a naive toy they wanted to play around with.
Yes and that's what I'm pointing out, they vibe coded it and the headline is somewhat misleading, although it's not the authors fault if you don't go read the article before commenting.
But it does have to do with AI (obviously), and specifically the capabilities of AI. If you need to be knowledgable about how wifi drivers work and put in effort to get a decent result, that obviously speaks volumes about the capabilities of the vibe coding approach.
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> The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
Aren't you just describing every vibe code ever?
To think about it, that is probably my main issue with AI art/books etc. They never put in any effort. In fact, even the competition is about putting least effort.
Programmers have always been in search of an additional layer of abstraction. LLM coding feeds exactly into this impulse.
> instead of software we will just have the LLM output bespoke code for every single computer interaction.
That's sort of the idea behind GPU upscaling: You increase gaming performance and visual sharpness by rendering games at lower resolutions and use algorithms to upscale to the monitor's native resolution. Somehow cheaper than actually rendering at high resolution: Let the GPU hallucinate the difference at a lower cost.
> Instead of continuing with the code, I spawned a fresh Pi session, and asked the agent to write a detailed specification of how the brcmfmac driver works
Planning markdown files are critical for any large LLM task.
The line between AI-assisted clean-room reverse-engineeing and open-source-license-laundering is a thin one, and I think the one described in the article crosses over to laundering. In classic clean-room design, one team documents the interfaces - not the code.
I feel like ubiquitous hardware support in every OS is going to be a solved problem soon. We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything. The hardware designer would have to go well out of their way to obfuscate the interface if they really wanted to forbid it, instead of just not bothering to support an OS like BSD or Linux.
The primary reason why it worked is because Claude could rip off the Linux driver. Without any prior work to rely on, how will the AI figure out proprietary hardware?
He also mentioned it took 2 months. I’m actually wondering how long it would take to do the Linux to BSD port by eyeball, or at least ai assisted. Probably not that much longer? I guess it depends on wall time vs real time.
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- have AI write a windows filter driver to capture all hardware communications
- have AI reverse engineer Windows WiFi driver and make a crude prototype
- have AI compare registers captured by filter driver with linux driver version and iterate until they match (or at least functional tests pass)
not exactly rocket surgery, and windows device drivers generally don't have DRM/obfuscation, so reverse engineering them isn't hard for LLMs.
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True. But also -- how do humans do it? There are docs and there's other similar driver code. I wouldn't be surprised if Claude could build new driver code sight-unseen, given the appropriate resources
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Trial and error?
Just like it does when given an existing GPL’d source and dealing with its hallucinations, the agent could be operated on a black box (or a binary Windows driver and a disassembly)?
The GPL code helped here but as long as the agent can run in a loop and test its work against a piece of hardware, I don’t see why it couldn’t do the same without any code given enough time?
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Combine AI + genetic algo?
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning/comments/1665d...
I haven't read the article but my first question was, install wifibox?
It's a bhyve VM running alpine Linux and you pass through your WiFi adaptor and get a bridge out on the freebsd host.
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Repurposing NDIS drivers is a time honored tradition. No source, but oh well.
GPL is not a patent. It covers the work and _derivatives_; it does not cover ideas or general knowledge. The chip in question has docs.
I fully expect that Claude wrote code that does not resemble that of the driver in the Linux tree. TFA is taking on some liability if it turns out that the code Claude wrote does largely resemble GPL'ed code, but if TFA is not comfortable with the code written by Claude not resembling existing GPL'ed code then they can just post their prompts and everyone who needs this driver can go through the process of getting Claude to code it.
In court TFA would be a defendant, so TFA needs to be sure enough that the code in question does not resemble GPL'ed code. Here in the court of public opinion I'd say that claims of GPL violation need to be backed up by a serious similarity analysis.
Prompts cannot possibly be considered derivatives of the GPL'ed code that Claude might mimic.
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Maybe one day, but it doesn't look like we are very close yet. From the OP article, they handed it the working linux driver and asked it to just make this FreeBSD compatible, but it could not. Looks like it took OP a significant amount of work over 2 months to get something that seems to work.
What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading, etc.
> What is interesting is it seems like the work resembles regular management, asking for a written specification, proof reading, etc.
That's how I've been using the bot for years. Organize tasks, mediate between them, look for obvious-to-me problems and traps as things progress, and provide corrections where that seems useful.
It differs from regular management, I think, in that the sunk costs are never very significant.
Find a design issue that requires throwing out big chunks of work? No problem: Just change that part of the spec and run through the process for that and the stuff beneath it again. These parts cost approximately nothing to produce the first time through, and they'll still cost approximately nothing to produce the second time.
I'm not building a physical structure here, nor am I paying salaries or waiting days or weeks to refactor: If the foundation is wrong, then just nuke it and start over fresh. Clean slates are cheap.
(I don't know if that's the right way to do it, or the wrong way. But it works -- for me, at least, with the things I want to get done with a computer.)
To make these things work you do need to write a spec and figure out what unit tests will prove it actually did what you want. Even then it will take a bunch of shortcuts so it's best if you're a domain expert anyway.
Aka, the hard part.
Drivers can be anywhere from so trivial you can throw it together by hand in an afternoon to so complex that it requires an entire engineering team six months of concentrated effort.
That pesky GPL does not stop us anymore, cool.
What would the GPL have to do with this?
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> We're very close to just being about to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything.
That sounds quite naive and it isn't that simple. Even the author expressed caution and isn't sure about how robust the driver is since he hasn't seen the code himself nor does he know if it works reliably.
Even entertaining the idea, someone would have already have replaced those closed source Nvidia drivers that have firmware blobs and other drivers that have firmware blobs to be open replacements. (Yes Nouveau exists, but at the disadvantage of not performing as well as the closed source driver)
That would be a task left to the reader.
> We're very close to just being about to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything.
This is false. To "brute force" a driver, you'd need a feedback loop between the hardware's output and the driver's input.
While, in theory, this is possible for some analog-digital traducers (e.g WI-FI radio), if the hardware is a human-interface system (joystick, monitor, mouse, speaker, etc.) you literally need a "human in the loop" to provide feedback.
Additionally, many edge-cases in driving hardware can irrevocably destroy it and even a domain-specific agent wouldn't have any physics context for the underlying risks.
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I'm not so sure that Nouveau is slower than the proprietary Nvidia driver. I didn't run benchmarks on my personal use case but my subjective experience is that Nouveau might be faster. It's a Debian 11, X11, NVIDIA driver vs Debian 13, X11, Nouveau on the same laptop with a Quadro K1100mq. The desktop of the newer system seems to be faster. Of course it could be the sum of the individual improvements of kernel, GNOME, etc. I only move windows around my desktop, no games, so it's a very limited scenario.
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someone would have already have replaced those closed source Nvidia drivers that have firmware blobs
This isn’t quite a fair example, these are so massively complex with code path built explicitly for so many individual applications. Nvidia cards are nearly a complete SoC.
Though then again, coding agents 1 year ago of the full autonomous sort were barely months old, and now here we are in one year. So, maybe soon this could be realistic? Hard to say. Even if code agents can do it, it still costs $ via tokens and api calls. But a year ago it would have cost me at least a few dollars and a lot more time to do things I get done now in a prompt and 10 minutes of Opus in a sandbox.
Hardware driver bugs frequently manifest as concurrency flakiness or heisenbugs.
AI is notoriously bad at dealing with bugs that only cause problems every few weeks.
I've thought for a while now that we'll end up moving to stricter languages that have safer concurrency, etc, partly for this reason. The most prominent resistance against such languages was the learning curve, but humans like OP aren't looking at the code now.
The driver used as inspiration is fully opensource
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/v6.18/drivers/net/wir...
I don't know why it has not been brought in the BSDs (maybe license), but they do are a bit more careful with what they include in the OS.
Had an experience like this recently. QEMU stopped compiling for old versions of MacOS (pre-13) w/M1 arch, due to it requiring newer SDKs which don't support older MacOS versions. I put Sonnet 4.6 on the case, and it wrote a small patch, compiled and installed it in a matter of minutes, without giving it any instructions other than to look at errors and apply a fix. I definitely would have just given up without the AI.
The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.
Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not
My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want
This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.
What ever happened to that?
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Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make use of this software without caution as expressed in the article.
For most people the main difference will be: Will it run and solve my problem? Soon we will see malware being put into vibe coded software - who will wants to check every commit for write-only software?
I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code.
If I want to buy more tickets the same day, the ai agent will likely reuse the same code. But if i buy tickets again in one year, the agent will likely rebuild the code to adjust to the new API version the ticket company now offers. Seems wasteful but it’s more dynamic. Vendors only need to provide raw APIs and your agent can create the ui experience you want. In that regard nobody but the company that owns your agent can inject malware into the software you use. Some software will last more than others (e.g., the music player your agent provided won’t probably be rebuilt unless you want a new look and feel or extra functionality). I think we’ll adopt the “cattle, not pets” approach to software too.
Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets.
Like what are we even doing here...
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Aren’t we kinda realising that disposable/throwaway stuff is, like, bad? Why do we have to go down this wasteful and hyper-consumptive route AGAIN. Can we try and see the patterns here and move forwards?
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This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly?
Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself
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eventually people will figure out what is safe to let AI build-and-run without supervision, and what level of problem do you need to actually understand what's under the hood, audit what it does, how to maintain it, etc
I need a way to inventory my vintage video games and my wife's large board game collection. I have some strong opinions, and it's very low risk so I'll probably let Claude build the whole thing, and I'll just run it
Would I do that with something that was keeping track of my finances, ensuring I paid things on time, or ensuring the safety of my house, or driving my car for me? Probably not. For those categories of software since I'm not an expert in those fields, but also it's important that they work and I trust them, I'll prefer software written and maintained by vendors with expertise and a track record in those fields
This is exactly why I built SkillForge (skillforge.expert) - to capture and reuse expertise. You effectively taught an AI your Wi-Fi knowledge by recording your workflow. We do the same for browser automation: record your screen, extract reusable agent skills. 50 free credits if you want to try it out.
It used an existing implementation, in theory this was mostly a porting task.
GPL-wise, I don't know how much is inspiration vs "based on" would this be, it'd be interesting to compare.
This looks like my Company peers, as long as there is any existing implementation they are pretty confident they can deliver, poor suckers that do the "no one has done it before" first pass don't get any recognition.
It'd be nice to have drivers for newer Mac's for a better Asahi Linux experience. Good use of AI imo.
AI wouldn't work here. The OP task was converting one open source driver in to another one for FreeBSD. Since Mac doesn't have open source drivers to start with, a person still has to do the ground research. At least until you can somehow give the AI the ability to fully interact with the computer at the lowest levels and observe hardware connected to it.
We don't use AI to help write code due to copyright concerns, it's against our policy. We obviously need to be very careful with what we're doing, and we can't be sure it hasn't seen Apple docs or RE'ed Apple binaries etc (which we have very careful clean-room policies on) in its training data. It also can't be guaranteed that the generated code is GPL+MIT compatible (as it may draw inspiration from other GPL only drivers in the same subsystems) but we wish to use GPL+MIT to enable BSD to take inspiration from the drivers.
Given that literally no one is enforcing this it seems like a moral rather than a business decision here no? Isn’t the risk here that your competitors, who have no such moral qualms, are just going to commit all sorts of blatant copyright infringement but it really doesn’t matter because no one is enforcing it?
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This is like complaining Delorean didn't make spare parts for your homemade time machine.
Even bigger accomplishment is ai finally figured out how to configure my samba share for guest access! Lol
Do postfix/dovecot next. It still struggles with that.
Your LICENSE file reminds me that the copyright status of LLM-generated code remains absolutely uncharted waters and it's not clear that you can in fact legally license this under ISC
Omg!!. Similarly, Do you know a way to interface with BIOS so that it can change the parameters?
We'll reverse engineer our way out of planned obsolescence
very neat, setting codex on the task of building a mac-compatible app for my Pharos Microsoft GPS-360 Receiver... we'll see how it goes!
> The person intentionally didn't put in much effort.
And it's incredible that they got a somewhat working wifi driver given just how little effort they put in.
I have no doubt that a motivated person with domain knowledge trying to make a robust community driver for unsupported hardware could absolutely accomplish this in a fraction of the time and would be good quality.
This used to be more common right? Back in the winmodem days?
AI didn't write a driver for him. He ported the Linux driver to FreeBSD with some assistance from an LLM.
What's more interesting to me is the licensing situation when this is done. Does the use of an LLM complicate it? Or is it just a derivative work which can be published under the ISC license [1] as well?
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license
That AI was trained on the GPLv2 Linux source code, which does have a driver for your Wi-Fi.
How is this not copyright laundering?
the spec-first approach is actually the historical clean-room technique, same way Phoenix BIOS was legally written without copyright exposure in the 80s -- one team writes spec from observation, completely separate team codes from spec only, no shared authors. here it's AI doing both passes but in different sessions with no shared context, which approximates the same separation. probably good enough legally but definitely interesting that the same old trick applies.
You haven't addressed the parent's concern at all, which is that what the LLM was trained on, not what was fed into its context window. The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.
Also, the "spec" that the LLM wrote to simulate the "clean-room" technique is full of C code from the Linux driver.
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We'll know once these 51 cases have worked their way through the courts: https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/10/08/status-of-all...
Prove the new code is similar to the corresponding driver in Linux. If you can then you can get the authors of the latter to file suit against TFA.
A very, very good point
An impressively softwarey alternative to simply pulling out the wifi module and replacing it with an AliExpress Apple wifi module adapter board and a compact M.2 WiFi module with a supported chipset :)
The DNS name has both Russian and Indian in it, and its about vibe coding and AI to make system level software which can access the plaintext of my app comms: nope, nope, nope, nope and oh hell no.
This is really neat, I'm glad it worked.
This is atrocious C code.
Looks fairly idiomatic. What specifically do you dislike about it?
Got a sample you think is particularly bad?
Throwing myself to the sharks here, but sure.
pcie.c
Is sc null? Who knows! Was it memset anywhere? No! Were any structs memset anywhere? Barely! Does this codebase check for null? Maybe in 3% of the places it should!
All throughout this codebase variables are declared and not initialized. Magic numbers are everywhere AND constants are defined everywhere. Constants are a mix of hex and int for what seem to be completely arbitrary reasons. Error handling is completely inconsistent, sometimes a function will return 5 places, sometimes a function will set an error code and jump to a label, and sometimes do both in the same function depending on which branch it hits.
All of this is the kind of code smell I would ask someone to justify and most likely rework.
Or I'm just a dumbass, I suppose I'll find out shortly.
Plus zig!
https://github.com/narqo/freebsd-brcmfmac/blob/be9b49c1bf942...
This is exciting! This sounds like a great application because it’s mostly tedious work to adjust an existing driver to another device.
The Linux community has been doing this since forever. Old hardware is fully supported on Linux, unless of course, you are a macOS fanboy because Apple will do everything to preventing you from owning your hardware, including locking hardware ID via firmware.
This isn't a news to be in here.
AIs being able to do this has not been around "since forever" though.
what a salty comment
I don’t think Apple is any different than any other vendor who doesn’t bother releasing Linux drivers? support for most devices depends on the community creating them no?
If you’re a macOS fanboy presumably you don’t care about Linux support.
>I don’t think Apple is any different than any other vendor
Read my previous comment again!! If you buy a genuine display and install it, it won't work because Apple locks the hardware ID via firmware. It must be installed by Apple only.
No other vendor does that, the Linux community always found its way to get a non-supported hardware working.
Windows until recently with the AI slope, was the only major OS used everywhere so why many vendors only have Windows driver, I understand theirs "Why bother?"
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> any different than any other vendor who doesn’t bother releasing Linux drivers
Which has dwindled in number so much as to practically not be problem anymore. There is even a Linux-only or Linux-first attitude with some vendors.
Buying Apple to run Linux borders on stupidity nowadays because of the vast better options fit for purpose.
Like buying a gasoline vehicle then complaining it can't run on diesel. It wasn't designed to.
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Most vendors are different from Apple in that they don't have their own OS and software ecosystem that is in direct competition with Linux.