4 ms·
Raiders of the Lost Array: vibe-coding a macOS driver for my orphaned Drobo
- basil_io 2mo agoGetting another decade out of working hardware by writing your own driver is exactly the kind of project LLMs are good for. Low stakes, well-scoped, and the alternative was e-waste.
- fetzu 1mo agoThat’s exactly what I figured. Even though I feel it should have been Drobo’s responsibility to at least provide a detailed doc before going under. They must have sold quite a few of these units, and I figure I’m one of the few (saw someone on Reddit reacting to a post to this with their own vibe-coded dashboard – which of course looks eerily similar) customers that went through such lengths to give their device a few more years. Providing an « official » open-source driver might have prevented some more e-wase – and token use!
- moribvndvs 2mo ago[flagged]
- k_roy 2mo ago>> I also ruled out the back doors: one USB interface, one LUN, both claimed. >What the fuck does this sentence even mean? Opus’ tone and style is nauseating. Seems pretty clear to me. Nothing exposed beyond the expected surface. Whining about everything being AI, is worse than the AI itself. Especially when the blog post as a whole is clearly human written. OVERWHELMINGLY so The actual AI stuff in the article is clearly called out and delineated.
- fetzu 1mo agoI’ll take the « OVERWHELMINGLY » as a compliment, I guess ;).
- moribvndvs 1mo agoYou’re referencing an argument I never made. I have no problem with the author’s post, I was very specifically complaining about Opus’ barely coherent style of prose.
- antx 1mo agoYou're not alone. My guess is that both interfaces where claimed (by a driver) already, so it's impossible to bypass (hence "back doors"), as the goal was to send commands directly to the hardware. But it's hard to derive that conclusion from context alone, the style is so fucking annoying to read.
- perching_aix 1mo agoDidn't know macOS is this "literally 1984", it's a bit wild. It got me to apply some slop of my own. Supposedly there's some new provisioning scheme that'd allow the author to not have to disable SIP: https://developer.apple.com/help/account/provisioning-profiles/create-a-driverkit-development-provisioning-profile/ https://developer.apple.com/help/account/provisioning-profil...
- fetzu 1mo agoDidn't know about this, thank you. I'll look into it.
- perching_aix 1mo agoLet me know if it worked out in the end, would be cool if it did.
- fetzu 1mo agoIt totally did work! I updated the apps and the docs (and the blog post) to reflect this. It is pretty self-involved and requires an active Apple Developer subscription – but it does get everything running without disabling SIP. Thanks again for the tip ;).
- perching_aix 1mo agoOh neat, cheers. Credit to GPT 5.6 Sol for actually unearthing this on my behalf, too. :)