Real example · Automation & AI agents
Revived a 25-year-old Linux tape driver with Claude Code
What they did
Dmitry Brant, a hobbyist who recovers data from 1990s tape cartridges, asked Claude Code to update an unmaintained floppy-tape kernel driver so it would build on modern Linux, load as a module and read a real tape.
How it went
He had a working module after two evenings of back-and-forth, a job he estimates would have meant several weeks of learning old kernel development by hand.
Worth knowing
The first build loaded but could not talk to the drive because of bad default I/O addresses. Claude could not run privileged commands, so he ran them and pasted the logs back, made some manual touch-ups, and says kernel know-how was needed because the agent was overconfident.
Try it yourself with Claude Code
Replace anything in [brackets] with your details.
This is an old open-source project that no longer builds: [repo or folder]. Goal: make it compile on [current OS and version] as [library, module or app].
First list the errors and group them by cause. Fix one group at a time and tell me the command to rebuild. When it runs but misbehaves, I will paste the logs; ask for them rather than guessing. Do not claim it works until I confirm with real hardware or real data.Read the original
Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver ↗
dmitrybrant.com · · Personal post
Attributed to the source linked below; not our own test.
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