FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

https://vladimir.varank.in/notes/2026/02/freebsd-brcmfmac/

by varankinv • 5 months ago

434 345 5 months ago

vladimir.varank.in

petcat5• 5 months ago

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.

rvz• 5 months ago

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.

calmbonsai2• 5 months ago

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.

ineedasername• 5 months ago

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.

pmontra• 5 months ago

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.

ahoka2• 5 months ago

That pesky GPL does not stop us anymore, cool.

petcat5• 5 months ago

What would the GPL have to do with this?

melagonster• 5 months ago

I do not know why people do not just add GPL license to their generated code.

diath• 5 months ago

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?

rustyhancock• 5 months ago

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.

bootwoot• 5 months ago

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

05• 5 months ago

- 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.

Nextgrid• 5 months ago

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?

WD-423• 5 months ago

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.

cryptonector3• 5 months ago

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.

dev_l1x_be• 5 months ago

Combine AI + genetic algo?

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning/comments/1665d...

toast0• 5 months ago

Repurposing NDIS drivers is a time honored tradition. No source, but oh well.

ranger_danger3• 5 months ago

It could be given reference material like documentation/datasheets and/or just be prompted as to how it should work.

josephg5• 5 months ago

The Linux driver in this case is ISC licensed. There’s no legal or ethical problem in porting it. This is open source working as intended.

I feel like the jury is still out on whether this is acceptable for GPL code. Suppose you get agent 1 to make a clear and detailed specification from reading copyrighted code (or from reverse engineering). Then get agent 2 to implement a new driver using the specification. Is there anything wrong with that?

Gud• 5 months ago

Why is this “ripping off”? It’s an ISC Licensed piece of code.

Gigachad5• 5 months ago

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.

lazide• 5 months ago

Aka, the hard part.

plagiarist• 5 months ago

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.

ssl-38• 5 months ago

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.)

estimator7292• 5 months ago

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.

octoberfranklin2• 5 months ago

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.

jomohke2• 5 months ago

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.

hahn-kev2• 5 months ago

So are people

bluGill2• 5 months ago

I've found ai really good at the rare problems. The code hangs 1 out of 200 times - it spends half an hour and finds a race condition and a proposed fix - something complex that is really difficult for humans to figure out. Now grated the above problem took a dozen rounds over a couple days to completly solve (and it happend more often than every two weeks), but it was able to find an answer given symptoms.

skydhash8• 5 months ago

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.

mschuster91• 5 months ago

We're very close to just being able to set an AI coding agent to brute-force a driver for anything.

Yeah, but that only works for so long as the AI doesn't brute force a command that hard-bricks the device. Say, it causes a voltage controller to give out way too high voltages by a command, burns e-fuses or erases vital EEPROM data (factory calibration presets come to my mind here).

jwatte2• 5 months ago

Tell me you've never developed a driver, without telling me you've never developed a driver.

wangzhongwang• 5 months ago

I think we're closer than most people realize, but the hard part isn't generating the code — it's testing it. Drivers need to handle edge cases that only show up under specific hardware conditions, timing issues, power states, etc. An AI can write a first draft pretty fast, but validating it still requires actual hardware in the loop. The FreeBSD case worked because brcmfmac is well-documented and the author could test on real hardware. For more obscure chipsets with no public datasheets, we're still stuck.

ulf-77723• 5 months ago

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?

tkiolp45• 5 months ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS7• 5 months ago

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

slopinthebag16• 5 months ago

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...

whackernews2• 5 months ago

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?

falkensmaize2• 5 months ago

I don't know if this is the future or not, but it seems to serve no real purpose other than to enrich LLM company profits. There is real value in well designed code that has been battle tested and hardened over years of bugfixes and iteration. It's reliable, it's reusable, it's efficient and it's secure. The opposite of hastily written and poorly understood vibe code that may or may not even do what you want it to do, even while you think it's doing what you want it to do.

mixdup7• 5 months ago

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

groundzeros2015• 5 months ago

This is exciting! This sounds like a great application because it’s mostly tedious work to adjust an existing driver to another device.

b8• 5 months ago

It'd be nice to have drivers for newer Mac's for a better Asahi Linux experience. Good use of AI imo.

Gigachad5• 5 months ago

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.

jeroenhd4• 5 months ago

Someone else here suggested having an AI write a filter driver to intercept hardware communications on Windows and try to write a driver based on that, I presume macOS can also be coerced into loading such a driver?

That approach could work, though it'll require a lot of brute-forcing from the AI and loading a lot of broken kernels to see if they work. Plus, if audio drivers are involved, you'd probably blow out the speakers at least once during testing.

Still, if you throw enough money at Claude, I think this approach is feasible to get things booting at the very least. The question then becomes how one would reverse-engineer the slop so human hands can patch things to work well afterwards, which may take as much time as having humans write the code/investigate hardware traces in the first place.

tokyobreakfast2• 5 months ago

This is like complaining Delorean didn't make spare parts for your homemade time machine.

integralpilot2• 5 months ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS7• 5 months ago

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?

midtake• 5 months ago

This used to be more common right? Back in the winmodem days?

octoberfranklin2• 5 months ago

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?

jdlyga• 5 months ago

A very, very good point

cryptonector3• 5 months ago

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.

neom• 5 months ago

We'll know once these 51 cases have worked their way through the courts: https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/10/08/status-of-all...

yjftsjthsd-h2• 5 months ago

The general question is worth asking, but in this particular case, the article says

Brcmfmac is a Linux driver (ISC licence) for set of FullMAC chips from Broadcom

irishcoffee3• 5 months ago

This is really neat, I'm glad it worked.

This is atrocious C code.

cryptonector3• 5 months ago

Got a sample you think is particularly bad?

irishcoffee3• 5 months ago

Throwing myself to the sharks here, but sure.

pcie.c

  /*
  * BAR0 register access
  */
  uint32_t
  brcmf_reg_read(struct brcmf_softc *sc, uint32_t off)
  {
 return (bus_space_read_4(sc->reg_bst, sc->reg_bsh, off));
  }

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.

bdamm• 5 months ago

Looks fairly idiomatic. What specifically do you dislike about it?

adolph• 5 months ago

Plus zig!

  **Decision**: Use C for kernel interactions, Zig for pure logic only.

https://github.com/narqo/freebsd-brcmfmac/blob/be9b49c1bf942...

bw86• 5 months ago

https://github.com/narqo/freebsd-brcmfmac/blob/be9b49c1bf942... seems to be the only file written in Zig.

Using an entire additional programming language for 229 lines of code is definitely an interesting choice.

0xbadcafebee4• 5 months ago

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.

ranger_danger3• 5 months ago

Mind sharing that patch?

0xbadcafebee4• 5 months ago

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/73519

warkdarrior• 5 months ago

Mind sharing the prompt?

0xbadcafebee4• 5 months ago

It was along the lines of "try to install colima with macports, look at errors, apply a fix". GitHub Copilot w/Sonnet 4.6 model

hnarn• 5 months ago

Why would you solve an issue like this and then not supply a patch upstream, or at the very least contact someone that could? It seems to be like the FLOSS equivalent of posting about a problem on a forum and then replying "nvm, solved it".

circularfoyers• 5 months ago

I would hazard a guess that it's because there's been many debates about contributing PRs that might be perceived as AI slop. Not saying that's the case here, but it's possible the fix might be a poor one, not follow the project's guidelines, or one which the contributor doesn't fully understand, but doesn't care because it fixed the issue. I would guess the better approach would be to submit a bug report with the same information the LLM used, and maybe suggest there the fix the LLM provided. Unless this really was a tiny patch and none of the above concerns applied.

ang_cire5• 5 months ago

As the other person said, a LOT of github projects with medium-large contributor bases are extremely hostile to AI code contributions. Some of this is about 'slop' coding not being up to par. A lot of it is also about people making their github contributions part of their resume, and thus not wanting the 'devaluation' of their time investments by AI contributions.

Avamander2• 5 months ago

Primarily because OP can't verify that the patch is truly correct. There's also the fact that anything LLM-generated will likely be frowned upon (for the same reason).

With some effort OP could review it manually and then try to submit it though.

But QEMU uses a mailing list for development, it's tedious to set up and then later keep track of. I now fundamentally refuse to contribute to projects that use mailing lists for development, the effort it takes and the experience is just so horrible.

Especially if it's a small patch that doesn't concern anyone (any big sponsors), you'll probably never get a response. Things get lost easily.

0xbadcafebee4• 5 months ago

1) The upstream only supports latest versions of SDK, they're not going to accept a patch to make the app work on an older SDK

2) I sent the patch to MacPorts which is what I was using and also had failed builds, and the maintainers closed my submission as a dupe (of a ticket which actually didn't have the full patch nor anyone testing it). I offered to do more investigation, no response

3) It's open source, I really don't owe anyone anything, nor they me

gregoriol• 5 months ago

I've had a similar experience with a very long standing bug on a github project that really annoyed me but I didn't have time nor experience with the project's context to work on it. So Claude investigated and after many iterations (>100, very complex project), it managed to make it work.

dudu24• 5 months ago

My Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller didn't work with my Mac, so I had Claude write me a driver. Amazing times we live in. (As long as I still have a job so I can buy controllers in ten years.)

dmix• 5 months ago

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.

overfeed• 5 months ago

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.

dhon_• 5 months ago

In this case though, the new driver has the same license as the project it was based on and explicitly credits the original project

  ISC License
  
  Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Broadcom Corporation
  Copyright (c) brcmfmac-freebsd contributors
  
  Based on the Linux brcmfmac driver.

Avamander2• 5 months ago

It heavily depends on what you mean by "not the code", if all the code does is implement the necessary steps for the interface, then it's part of the interface. It's an interpretation of an interpretation of a datasheet.

nicman23• 5 months ago

i mean clean room was always license laundering and an AI agent cannot hold any copyright and it is largely not the same code

dumbfounder• 5 months ago

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.

mixdup7• 5 months ago

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

alwillis4• 5 months ago

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

Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.

This not about tinkering.

SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...

Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...

delfinom• 5 months ago

The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed.

Or perpetual work camps for the masses.

tclancy2• 5 months ago

Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it.

Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something.

bmurphy19763• 5 months ago

Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today.

We'll be right back here in no-time.

DaanDL• 5 months ago

Correct, my ex couldn't even be bothered to update the notification settings on her iPhone, let alone she'd be generating and deploying an app using an LLM. Most people just don't want to have anything to do with tech, they just want it to work and get out of their way.

I did the same with my car, technically I could do maintenance myself and troubleshoot and what not, but I just couldn't be arsed, so I outsource it at a premium price.

miki1232112• 5 months ago

They won't think about it in terms of building software, just like many house buyers don't think in terms of building houses, even though somebody has effectively built a house just for them.

They'll just ask their bank to help them fill out a family income form based on last year's earnings. They'll get the numbers back, without thinking about the Python script that used Pandas and some web APIs to generate those numbers. They'll think about it in terms of "that thing that Chat GPT just gave me to compare truck from nearby local dealers", without realizing that it's actually a React app, partially powered by reverse-engineered APIs, partially by data that their agent scraped off Facebook and Craigslist.

fragmede4• 5 months ago

No judgement, but if my mom or dad had a problem I could solve with a couple hours a month, with an larger initial investment of time at the beginning, I'd be willing to make it for them.

To the matter of driving a truck though, if someone needs an app idea, blue collar workers are having to spend an hour after work logging what they did that day. If they could do it in their truck while driving home for the day, you could make a pile of cash selling an app that lets them do that.

Gigachad5• 5 months ago

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.

vvpan• 5 months ago

What ever happened to that?

sarchertech• 5 months ago

Business software is also useful because it gives companies a process to follow that even if not optimal, is probably better than what they’d come up with on their own.

riffraff2• 5 months ago

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.

Yeah, I've seen perfectly good flexible in house products abandoned because it was just easier to hire people who knew Salesforce or whatever.

But the true AI Believer would object you don't need to hire anymore, you can just get more agents to cold call or whatever :)

jajuuka• 5 months ago

Definitely feels like that is the bigger take away. Not that it "solves all problems" or "isn't good enough to be merged". But that we are arriving to a place where solutions can be good enough to solve the problem you have. Reminds me of early Github when custom and unique software became much more accessible to everyone. Way less digging or going without.

hahn-kev2• 5 months ago

What I want is to be able to use AI to modify the software we already have. Granted I've wanted to do that long before AI, but now maybe plugins will get more popular again now that AI could write them for us

bonesss• 5 months ago

I’m imagining a world where everyone was using emacs/lisp or Smalltalk VMs, and what kind of world-improving insanity we could be sharing through LLMs.

mock-possum• 5 months ago

But people don’t actually want to just build it themselves - they never have, and I don’t see any reason to believe they ever will.

secbear2• 5 months ago

Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software

tclancy2• 5 months ago

Yes, but this is the honeymoon period. A year from now when you want to make three of the tools talk to each other and they're in three different languages, two of which you don't know and there's no common interface or good place to put one, well, here's hoping you hung onto the design documents.

jmspring• 5 months ago

This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan.

The majority of computer users are not on HN.

You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech.

croes3• 5 months ago

Lots of unaudited and battle tested software. Sounds like a nightmare.

miki1232112• 5 months ago

Funnily enough, this will make many "tragedy of the commons" / "Goodhart's law hacking" problems more tractable.

Right now, there's only one Google algorithm, one Amazon search and so on. The moment you let agents run wild, each with a different model, prompt and memory, effectively introducing randomness into the process, it becomes much harder to optimize for "metric go up."

reactordev2• 5 months ago

we've seen what "no barrier of entry" marketplaces look like...

Quality go down.

petesergeant• 5 months ago

I think Greasemonkey scripts to fix the websites you use is an interesting area too. My bank now supports OFX exports because Claude vibecoded me an extractor for it in 10m.

goombacloud• 5 months ago

They won't build software, they'll let some AI-based software do the execution of their instructions (which is inefficient, opaque, vendor-locked, not reproducible etc.)

red-iron-pine• 5 months ago

why would F500 FAANG type orgs ever want the consumer to create their own software?

how will stock prices rise, outside of the one holder of the AI?

vercantez• 5 months ago

We'll reverse engineer our way out of planned obsolescence

slopinthebag16• 5 months ago

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.

petcat5• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

Gigachad5• 5 months 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.

slopinthebag16• 5 months 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.

acedTrex• 5 months 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.

etcetera1• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

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

jomohke2• 5 months 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?

slopinthebag16• 5 months 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.

1024core• 5 months ago

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.

staplers• 5 months ago

People abstract upon new leaps in invention way too early though. Believing these leaps are becoming the standard. Look at cars, airplanes, phones, etc.

After we landed on the moon people were hyped for casual space living within 50 years.

The reality is it often takes much much longer as invention isn't isolated to itself. It requires integration into the real world and all the complexities it meets.

Even moreso, we may have ai models that can do anything perfectly but it will require so much compute that only the richest of the rich are able to use it and it effectively won't exist for most people.

democracy3• 5 months ago

> Do you see any reason that progress will stop abruptly here?

I do. When someone thinks they are building next generation super software for 20$ a month using AI, they conveniently forget someone else is paying the remaining 19,980$ for them for compute power and electricity.

rayiner3• 5 months 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?

bluGill2• 5 months 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)

einpoklum• 5 months ago

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

jeremyjh2• 5 months ago

It wasn't a straight port, he had an LLM write a spec by reviewing the code, and then in another session another LLM did the development. That is basically a Clean-room approach. It would be unlikely there would be much - if any - code that is exactly the same so showing copyright infringement seems very unlikely.

jeroenhd4• 5 months ago

I'd call it clean room if the AI wasn't trained on the open source drivers in the first place. The open source driver is in there, albeit in the form of lossy text compression with an external dictionary.

Now one side is collecting the necessary tokens to get the AI to output data from the training set in the second run.

lgats2• 5 months ago

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!

lgats2• 5 months ago

https://github.com/lrehmann/gps360-viewer

cool result from this otherwise defunct hardware!

bandrami3• 5 months ago

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

psyclobe• 5 months ago

Even bigger accomplishment is ai finally figured out how to configure my samba share for guest access! Lol

doublerabbit• 5 months ago

Do postfix/dovecot next. It still struggles with that.

LowLevelKernel• 5 months ago

Omg!!. Similarly, Do you know a way to interface with BIOS so that it can change the parameters?

jeroenhd4• 5 months ago

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?efivar and underlying APIs should be able to tweak some settings depending on how many variables are exported.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/536436/linux-modify... suggests there may be risks involved using efivar to configure Apple hardware, as there probably isn't any kind of testing or validation present on the variables you set, but if you know what you're doing you should have similar control as you'd have on native macOS I believe.

renecito• 5 months ago

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.

theodric• 5 months ago

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 :)

VWWHFSfQ• 5 months ago

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.

syngrog66• 5 months ago

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.

xyproto• 5 months ago

Now we can have operating systems that write the drivers they need at boot.

matthewfcarlson• 5 months ago

I know this is me coming from my spoiled perspective of Linux and macOS, but the advice of running a VM that manages the WiFi hardware and passing it back to the OS seems insane to me

Firerouge• 5 months ago

Qubes OS is the Linux version of this concept. Hardware and their drivers get VMs for security boundary isolation.

skydhash8• 5 months ago

Computers are so complicated right now that they're literally a network of computers. When you consider the closed firmware issue, using a VM is like having a small router you connect with ethernet. And I believe you could run such VM with 64MB of RAM.

josephg5• 5 months ago

If an OS is designed to do this from the ground up, it can be incredibly efficient. (See: SeL4). Each process on linux is essentially its own isolated virtual machine already. Linux processes just have all sorts of ambient authority - for example, to access the filesystem and network on behalf of the user which started the process. Restricting what a process can do (sandboxing it) shouldn't have any bearing on performance.

secbear2• 5 months ago

seems pretty solid from a security perspective actually

hoherd• 5 months ago

In my experience, AI is really good at creating bloatware, which makes it doubly frustrating that it is eating up all the RAM.

dheera• 5 months ago

Bloatware existed as soon as JavaScript became good enough to write apps in it.

Text boxes are now drawn with nested DIV hells created by polyfills and layers of React crepe cake and not a simple drawRect call to draw the text box

raverbashing• 5 months ago

Honestly it's not spoiled to want to use the hardware you paid for

bandrami3• 5 months ago

Architecturally it makes a kind of sense given the way firmware operates (a lot of your peripherals are mini-computers inside your computer)

iszomer• 5 months ago

Yup. The smartnic's we used in a previous gpu sku is now repurposed as the head node for another storage based sku.

jeroenhd4• 5 months ago

If I were to design an OS from the ground up today, that's probably the approach I'd take. Separate risky drivers off into virtual machines with limited attack surface and a controlled I/O system so that a hacked driver can't infect the rest of the system. Plus, if the code crashes, the kernel doesn't go down with it.

Windows and Linux have been moving drivers towards userland to deal with kernel instability and security risks but with modern virtualisation capabilities, I think going one step further only makes sense. Windows itself is already using something called "virtualisation based security" to leverage VMs to secure the kernel and this is just the logical next step.

Qubes does this stuff too, though it works with fully-featured Linux kernels rather than minimal driver interfaces, for exactly the same reasons. A hacked wifi driver may be able to inspect and redirect traffic, but it can't do much more than that, which combined with a strong VPN can protect from quite complicated attack scenarios that normal people have no other recourse against.

foodforpokemon• 5 months ago

*built

with2• 5 months ago

a kernel module written entirely by AI, loading into ring 0, that the author admits has known issues and shouldnt be used in production. Were speedrunning the "insecure by default" era.

queuebert• 5 months ago

If I were a superintelligent AI trying to escape, wifi drivers seem like a great way to do it.

burnermore• 5 months ago

OK. This gives me eagle eye movie vibes!

with2• 5 months ago

well that is for certain

vermaden• 5 months ago

Manufacturer/vendor did not provided open source driver with real freedom license (BSD/MIT/...) or documentation on which the driver could be written ... this is the result ... and its still better to overcome a problem in any way then to NOT overcome it at all ... and this driver is just a code - people can look at it and improve it.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 5 months ago

Manufacturer/vendor did not provided open source driver with real freedom license (BSD/MIT/...)

Article says,

Brcmfmac is a Linux driver (ISC licence) for set of FullMAC chips from Broadcom

I don't feel like looking to see where the Linux driver came from, but someone provided a permissively-licensed driver.

treesknees• 5 months ago

And so what? Security is important, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with an experiment or side project with full disclosure upfront about its known limitations.

People should be empowered to share and tinker, without feeling like they need to setup a bug bounty program first. Not every GitHub project is a vendor/customer relationship.

croes3• 5 months ago

But LLMs will get that code for the next raining and planty of people will use it productive, just look how many people use OpenClaw.

There are people for whom a software that compiles without error is for productive use cases

adseeker• 5 months ago

Dude is at Grafana, this port is an advertisement stunt:

https://grafana.com/blog/generative-ai-at-grafana-labs-whats...

Don't use it and don't use Grafana.

grahamjperrin• 5 months ago

Anything more recent than a 2023 blog post?

fuddle• 5 months ago

To be honest, I find this more impressive, than Claude writing a browser from scratch.

democracy3• 5 months ago

Lame! I would vibe-code a new OS that already has all the drivers!

chromehearts• 5 months ago

You can be the next one! - https://github.com/kaansenol5/VibeOS

gck12• 5 months ago

This is the third time I see pi mentioned over the last few days and pi is the first project where every writeup I've read about it is actually helpful and goes into details on how things were done and what things were built, with git repos. This is a common complaint on HN.

Now, since Claude Code is banning accounts for usage of pi (or rather, how pi is configured to use Claude models), how complicated would it be to wire pi through Anthropic's harness and treat anthropic harness as a dumb shell?

wklm• 5 months ago

are they actually banning subscription accounts for using the 3rd party cli's?

gck12• 5 months ago

Yeah, third party harness repos that utilized OAuth tokens have lots of reports, so it is enforced.

Google does the same, and it seems Google is much more aggressive about it, I've seen way more reports of Google bans than Anthropic.

Just one example here: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/6930

veunes3• 5 months ago

Spot on about keeping that AGENTS.md and logging all decisions. Letting an agent code for a long stretch without pinning down the state is a surefire way to end up with a Frankenstein codebase. Forcing it to document why you ditched LinuxKPI and went native basically saved the project. It's kinda ironic that AI is making us enforce strict project documentation - the exact thing human devs never have time for

rurban• 5 months ago

More importantly to me is the question if he committed all the stages to git. Without that you and the AI easily get lost.

seuros• 5 months ago

This is crap .. the driver is untested piece of hallucination.

I have exact MacBook and chipset that op is claiming to support.

The driver doesn't even compile without modifications.

It attach to the device, but you can't scan, associate or do anything.

Basically the whole driver is stubbed.

FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

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