Has anyone had any luck in writing drivers using LLMs?
It’s one of those areas of software that is very niche and no one wants to do it.
And it’s also relatively testable
Drivers live at a nasty intersection of kernel land code, hardware-coupled code, poorly documented interfaces and undocumented interactions that have to be trialed-and-errored on real HW.
Modern LLMs kick ass, but they aren't magic.
Fully vibe coding a driver for things more complex than, perhaps, a well documented CMOS sensor (that's a small part of what's covered in the article) is still a no-no.
But an LLM does wonders at emitting boilerplate, "vibe checking" your implementations, suggesting how to implement certain things, helping debug some of the things, etc. You can get the LLM to do a lot, but you still need a lot of understanding, and a lot of applied handholding.
Yes this was done with Opus 4.8 and it was very effective. I ran a local harness on the phone itself so it could probe around and experiment. You do have to reboot into a newly compiled kernel occasionally if a module reload is not sufficient.
Obviously this work was mainly porting downstream code and information so the scope was fairly limited but the diagnostics it could do were very impressive.
Modern LLMs kick ass, but they aren't magic.
Fully vibe coding a driver for things more complex than, perhaps, a well documented CMOS sensor (that's a small part of what's covered in the article) is still a no-no.
But an LLM does wonders at emitting boilerplate, "vibe checking" your implementations, suggesting how to implement certain things, helping debug some of the things, etc. You can get the LLM to do a lot, but you still need a lot of understanding, and a lot of applied handholding.