Using Claude Code to Modernize a 25-Year-Old Kernel Driver

That is a bit different than allowing unconfirmed loading of arbitrary kernel code without proper authentication.

There are? For example, rails has had boilerplate generation commands for a couple of decades.

And then… that just kind of dropped out of the discussion. Throw things at the wall as fast as possible and see what stuck, deal with the consequences later. And to be fair, there were studies showing that choice of language didn’t actually make as big of difference as found in the emotions behind the debates. And then the web… committee designed over years and years, with the neve the ability to start over. And lots of money meant that we needed lots of manager roles too. And managers elevate their status by having more people. And more people means more opportunity for specializations. It all becomes an unabated positive feedback loop.

I love that it’s meant my salary has steadily climbed over the years, but I’ve actually secretly thought it would be nice if there was bit of a collapse in the field, just so we could get back to solid basics again. But… not if I have to take a big pay cut. :)

Haskell mostly solves boilerplate in a typed way and Lisp mostly solves it in an untyped way (I know, I know, roughly speaking).

To put it bluntly, there's an intellectual difficulty barrier associated with understanding problems well enough to systematize away boilerplate and use these languages effectively.

The difficulty gap between writing a ton of boilerplate in Java and completely eliminating that boilerplate in Haskell is roughly analogous to the difficulty gap between bolting on the wheels at a car factory and programming a robot to bolt on the wheels for you. (The GHC compiler devs might be the robot manufacturers in this analogy.) The latter is obviously harder, and despite the labor savings, sometimes the economics of hiring a guy to sit there bolting on wheels still works out.

You dont understand how things evolve.

There have been plenty of platforms that got rid of boilerplate - e.g. ruby on rails about 20 years ago

But once they become the mainstream, people can get a competitive edge by re-adding loads of complexity and boilerplate again. E.g. complex front end frameworks like react.

If you want your startup to look good you've got to use the latest trendy front end thingummy

Also to be fair, its not just fashion. Features that would have been advanced 20 years ago become taken for granted as time goes on, hence we are always working at the current limit of complexity (and thats why we're always overrun with bugs and always coming up with new platforms to solve all the problems and get rid of all thr boilerplate so that we can invent new boilerplate)

i think it has. How much easier is it today than yester-decade to write, and deploy an application to multiple platforms (and have it look/run similarly)?

How little knowledge it requires now than before?

Lisp completely eliminates boilerplate and has been around for decades, but hardly anyone uses it because programs that use macros to eliminate boilerplate aren't easy to read.

In fact, collectively created 1000s of them and all of them a various flavor of mid.

Now we have a way we can get computers to do it!

Because everyone needs a boilerplate but it's a different boilerplate for everyone unless you're doing the most basic toy apps

Python’s subprocess for example has a lot of args and that reflects the reality that creating processes is finicky and there a lot of subtly different ways to do it. Getting an llm to understand your use case and create a subprocess call for you is much more realistic than imagining some future version of subprocess where the options are just magically gone and it knows what to do or we’ve standardized on only one way to do it and one thing that happens with the pipes and one thing for the return code and all the rest of it.

There is no software you could possibly write that works for everything thatd be as good as "Give me an internal dashboard with these features"

They weren’t just saying ‘AI writes the boilerplate for me.’ They were saying: once you’ve written the same glue the 3rd, 4th, 5th time, you can start folding that pattern into your own custom dev tooling.

AI not as a boilerplate writer but as an assistant to build out personal scaffolding toolset quickly and organically. Or maybe you think that should be more systemized and less personal?

It seems to me that LLMs help the most at the initial step of getting into some rabbit hole - when you're getting familiar with the jargon, so you can start reading some proper resources without being confused too much. The sooner you manage to move there, the better.

I lead the engineering team at my org and we hire almost exclusively for c++ engineers (we make games). Our build system by happenstance is written in c#, as are all the automation scripts. Out of our control to change. Should we require every engineer to be competent and write fluent c# or should we let them just get on with their value adds?

Reading code doesn't mean you can write it, as any programmer will tell you.

If I want to know if a string in ruby begins with another string, is the method starts_with or start_with or startwith like python or is it like perl where I have to use some completely different method? I don't know, better google it.

But if I'm reading and see `str.start_with?("https://")` I know instantly what it's doing.

Great skill multiplier, right?

A lot of people have the try and see if it works approach. That can be insanely wasteful in any moderately complex system. The scientist way is to have a model that reduce the system to a few parameters. Then you’ll see that a lot of libraries are mostly surface works and slighlty modified version of the same thing.