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> 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 again

> 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.

petcat 8mo ago
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.
- dude250711 8mo ago
  > 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.
- Gigachad 8mo ago
  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.
  - freeplay 8mo ago
    If you could write drivers in javascript, it probably would have done just fine /s
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - petcat 8mo ago
    I strongly suspect that somebody with domain knowledge around Wi-Fi drivers and OS kernel drivers could prompt the llm to spit out a lot more robust code than this guy was able to. That's not a knock on him, he was just trying to see what he could do. It's impressive what he actually accomplished given how little effort he put forth and how little knowledge he had about the subject.
    - slopinthebag 8mo ago
      Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. I thought the whole point was to allow people without said expertise to generate it. After all, that seems to be the promise.
      - garciasn 8mo ago
        Clearly there wasn't much appetite for someone to do that.
      - luckydata 8mo ago
        It will be like that at some point soon, just not now. Are you trying to make the point that because this technology is not yet perfect the fact that it can already do so much is unimpressive?
- acedTrex 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - dangus 8mo ago
    I’m not able to provide a comprehensive bug free driver.
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    Why is that the metric? In my job, I get drafts from junior employees that requires major revisions, often rewriting significant parts. It’s still faster to have someone take the first pass. Why can’t AI coding be used the same way? Especially if AIs are capable of following your own style and design choices, as well as testing code against a test suite, why isn’t it easier to start from a kind of working baseline than to rebuild from a raf h.
    - skydhash 8mo ago
      Dis you hire juniors just to get drafts? That seems pretty inneficient.
      - rayiner 8mo ago
        I'm a lawyer, so a bunch of work--factual analysis, legal research, etc.--goes into the draft that isn't just the words on the page. At the same time, the work product is meant to persuade human readers, so a lot of work goes into making the words on the page perfect. (Perhaps past the point of diminishing returns, but companies are willing to pay for that incremental edge when the stakes are high.) Programming is different in that you don't usually have senior engineers rewrite code written by junior engineers. On the other hand, look at how the Linux kernel is developed. You have Linus at the top, then subsystem maintainers vetting patches. The companies submitting patches presumably have layers of reviewers as well. Why couldn't you automate the lower layers of that process? Instead of having 5 junior people, maybe you have 2 somewhat more senior people leveraging AI. This is probably not sustainable unless the AI can eventually do the work the more senior people are doing. But that probably doesn't matter in the short term for the market.
etcetera1 8mo ago
> 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.
boplicity 8mo ago
Programmers have always been in search of an additional layer of abstraction. LLM coding feeds exactly into this impulse.
jomohke 8mo ago
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?
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    So far the people who bet against scaling laws have all lost money. That does not mean that their luck won’t change, but we should at least admit the winning streak.
    - slopinthebag 8mo ago
      You mean Moore's law? Which is now dead?
      - _zoltan_ 8mo ago
        it's not dead. it's enough to look at GB200/GB300 vs Vera Rubin specs.
      - selridge 8mo ago
        No I don't mean that. I mean the LLM parameter scaling laws. More importantly, it doesn't matter if I mean that or Moore's law or anything else, because I'm not making a forward looking prediction. Read what I wrote. I'm saying is if you bet AGAINST [LLM] scaling laws--meaning you bet that the output would peter out naturally somehow--you've lost 100% so far. 100% Tomorrow could be your lucky day. Or not.
rayiner 8mo ago
I don’t get this response. This is amazing! What percentage of programmers can even write a buggy FreeBSD kernel driver? If you were tasked at developing this yourself, wouldn’t it be a huge help to have something that already kind of works to get things started?
- bluGill 8mo ago
  Fairly high could - but some could start today some need a few months of study before they know how to start (and then take 10x long than the first person to get it working)
rozal 8mo ago
[dead]

petcat 8mo ago

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.

dude250711 8mo ago
> 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.
Gigachad 8mo ago
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.
- freeplay 8mo ago
  If you could write drivers in javascript, it probably would have done just fine /s
slopinthebag 8mo ago
> 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.
- petcat 8mo ago
  I strongly suspect that somebody with domain knowledge around Wi-Fi drivers and OS kernel drivers could prompt the llm to spit out a lot more robust code than this guy was able to. That's not a knock on him, he was just trying to see what he could do. It's impressive what he actually accomplished given how little effort he put forth and how little knowledge he had about the subject.
  - slopinthebag 8mo ago
    Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. I thought the whole point was to allow people without said expertise to generate it. After all, that seems to be the promise.
    - garciasn 8mo ago
      Clearly there wasn't much appetite for someone to do that.
    - luckydata 8mo ago
      It will be like that at some point soon, just not now. Are you trying to make the point that because this technology is not yet perfect the fact that it can already do so much is unimpressive?
acedTrex 8mo ago
> 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.
- dangus 8mo ago
  I’m not able to provide a comprehensive bug free driver.
- rayiner 8mo ago
  Why is that the metric? In my job, I get drafts from junior employees that requires major revisions, often rewriting significant parts. It’s still faster to have someone take the first pass. Why can’t AI coding be used the same way? Especially if AIs are capable of following your own style and design choices, as well as testing code against a test suite, why isn’t it easier to start from a kind of working baseline than to rebuild from a raf h.
  - skydhash 8mo ago
    Dis you hire juniors just to get drafts? That seems pretty inneficient.
    - rayiner 8mo ago
      I'm a lawyer, so a bunch of work--factual analysis, legal research, etc.--goes into the draft that isn't just the words on the page. At the same time, the work product is meant to persuade human readers, so a lot of work goes into making the words on the page perfect. (Perhaps past the point of diminishing returns, but companies are willing to pay for that incremental edge when the stakes are high.) Programming is different in that you don't usually have senior engineers rewrite code written by junior engineers. On the other hand, look at how the Linux kernel is developed. You have Linus at the top, then subsystem maintainers vetting patches. The companies submitting patches presumably have layers of reviewers as well. Why couldn't you automate the lower layers of that process? Instead of having 5 junior people, maybe you have 2 somewhat more senior people leveraging AI. This is probably not sustainable unless the AI can eventually do the work the more senior people are doing. But that probably doesn't matter in the short term for the market.

etcetera1 8mo ago

> 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.

boplicity 8mo ago

Programmers have always been in search of an additional layer of abstraction. LLM coding feeds exactly into this impulse.

jomohke 8mo ago

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?

slopinthebag 8mo ago
> 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.
- selridge 8mo ago
  So far the people who bet against scaling laws have all lost money. That does not mean that their luck won’t change, but we should at least admit the winning streak.
  - slopinthebag 8mo ago
    You mean Moore's law? Which is now dead?
    - _zoltan_ 8mo ago
      it's not dead. it's enough to look at GB200/GB300 vs Vera Rubin specs.
    - selridge 8mo ago
      No I don't mean that. I mean the LLM parameter scaling laws. More importantly, it doesn't matter if I mean that or Moore's law or anything else, because I'm not making a forward looking prediction. Read what I wrote. I'm saying is if you bet AGAINST [LLM] scaling laws--meaning you bet that the output would peter out naturally somehow--you've lost 100% so far. 100% Tomorrow could be your lucky day. Or not.

rayiner 8mo ago

I don’t get this response. This is amazing! What percentage of programmers can even write a buggy FreeBSD kernel driver? If you were tasked at developing this yourself, wouldn’t it be a huge help to have something that already kind of works to get things started?

bluGill 8mo ago
Fairly high could - but some could start today some need a few months of study before they know how to start (and then take 10x long than the first person to get it working)

rozal 8mo ago

[dead]