I only got it to the proof of concept stage. The patch adds aac but breaks flac support in the process. And it only works for aac in mp4 container files. But I’m sure with a bit of time we could make a patch which works everywhere and is additive only.
I say ‘we’ - I barely helped. Almost all the work was done by Claude.
Here’s Claude’s report, if anyone wants to build on this work:
https://claude.ai/code/artifact/87d38c2e-9ecb-4066-90cf-e0b2...
>Additional Old Linux Drivers Face Removal Due To Noise From AI/LLM Coding Agents
Not a successful anecdote, but I have a Windows Hello compatible Kengsington fingerprint reader, and for some time I wanted to write drivers for Linux. Even without using C, it would have been a huge undertaking only to fail in the end; because Claude did much of the research and concluded that the device wouldn't work on Linux (can't remember why but it made sense). Then it suggested what could work.
In this case:
LLMs know the USB Spec very well.
LLMs know how to read raw packet dumps.
LLMs know how to convert a packet dump to USB spec
LLMs know how to write code to generate USB packets from the spec.
Basically, If you have a well-documented problem, the LLM is a shortcut to learning it yourself. LLMs fail when you have a novel or poorly documented problem. They also fail when you provide the LLM with terrible context or too much context.
This is a very novel, reasonably-poorly-documented problem, and so far it has batted 1.000.
After 5-6 consecutive approaches fail, I need a reason to think the next one might work out to stay motivated.
Claude will keep burning credits trying new approaches until something sticks. That's a huge advantage in a field where most of the things you try don't go anywhere.
Reverse engineering isn't so much hard as it is exhausting.
LLMs simply don't care about exhaustion.
It also has the benefit that it doesn't usually matter too much if it gets minor details wrong. It's definitely one of the areas - like hacking - where it's a) tedious and b) insensitive to mistakes where AI absolutely shines.
The whole thing took about a day, spread out over a week or so. Without AI, I wouldn't have even started the project, because I couldn't spare the time it would have taken.
None of this would have been possible (or at least practical from a time-value perspective) for me to do without Claude driving the whole exercise.
The odds of success go up a LOT when the stock firmware is easy to extract and reverse engineer.
Or are we in a really cool time where we've solved everything so much so many times we can focus on other things?
Tertiary question: If answer two, what the fuck is that?
For programmers this is the equivalent of when accountants got spreadsheets. We can just tell the machine what to do without manually performing all the steps.
Some programmers enjoyed the code writing more than the problem solving though.