Something not yet mentioned by other commenters is the "giant caveat":
As a giant caveat, I should note that I have a small bit of
prior experience working with kernel modules, and a good
amount of experience with C in general, so I don’t want to
overstate Claude’s success in this scenario. As in, it
wasn’t literally three prompts to get Claude to poop out a
working kernel module, but rather several back-and-forth
conversations and, yes, several manual fixups of the code.
It would absolutely not be possible to perform this
modernization without a baseline knowledge of the internals
of a kernel module.
Of note is the last sentence:
It would absolutely not be possible to perform this
modernization without a baseline knowledge of the internals
of a kernel module.
This is critical context when using a code generation tool, no matter which one chosen.
Then the author states in the next section:
Interacting with Claude Code felt like an actual
collaboration with a fellow engineer. People like to
compare it to working with a “junior” engineer, and I think
that’s broadly accurate: it will do whatever you tell it to
do, it’s eager to please, it’s overconfident, it’s quick to
apologize and praise you for being “absolutely right” when
you point out a mistake it made, and so on.
I don't know what "fellow engineers" the author is accustomed to collaborating with, junior or otherwise, but the attributes enumerated above are those of a sycophant and not any engineer I have worked with.
Finally, the author asserts:
I’m sure that if I really wanted to, I could have done this
modernization effort on my own. But that would have
required me to learn kernel development as it was done 25
years ago.
This could also be described as "understanding the legacy solution and what needs to be done" when the expressed goal identified in the article title is:
... modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver
Another key activity identified as a benefit to avoid in the above quote is:
... required me to learn ...
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