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Comment by slopinthebag | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I strongly suspect that somebody with domain knowledge around Wi-Fi drivers and OS kernel drivers could prompt the llm to spit out a lot more robust code than this guy was able to. That's not a knock on him, he was just trying to see what he could do. It's impressive what he actually accomplished given how little effort he put forth and how little knowledge he had about the subject.

Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it. I thought the whole point was to allow people without said expertise to generate it. After all, that seems to be the promise.

> Someone with domain knowledge could also just write the code instead of trying to get the stochastic prediction machine to generate it.

Well, people with the domain knowledge exist, yet they have not yet written this driver... why not?

Because there is other code those experts want to write, and they don't have time to write it all... but what if they could just give a fairly straightforward prompt and have the LLM do it for them? And if it only took minor tweaks to the prompt to have it write drivers for all the myriad combinations of hardware and software? At that point, there might be enough time to write it all.

Just because people exist that can DO all the work doesn't mean we have enough person-hours to do ALL the work.

> Because there is other code those experts want to write, and they don't have time to write it all... but what if they could just give a fairly straightforward prompt and have the LLM do it for them?

Then pretty soon they wouldn't be the experts anymore?

Maybe? But you could make the same argument that programmers today aren't "experts" at computers because they don't know how to build CPUs.

There is no reason to believe you can't gain expertise while still using higher and higher level abstractions. Yes, you will lose some of that low level expertise, but you can still be an expert at the problem set itself.

The way I see it, this is only possible because you can trust the lower layers work reliably and predictably enough that you can move up.

If your operating system was regenerated every day slightly differently and with certain things working and others not, you’d quickly revert to the lower predictable abstraction.

Clearly there wasn't much appetite for someone to do that.

It will be like that at some point soon, just not now. Are you trying to make the point that because this technology is not yet perfect the fact that it can already do so much is unimpressive?

Will it happen before or after we get fusion energy? I heard that was coming soon too.

@petcat Is your nickname a description or an instruction?

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