Christian F.K. Schaller spent months stuck trying to get Claude Code to build a Linux driver for his film scanner. The breakthrough came after giving the agent a Windows virtual machine—a separate Windows system running inside Linux—and access to recordings of the scanner’s USB traffic. Within hours, he reports, it produced a recognizable scan; a much better driver followed days later.

The method matters more than the speed claim:

  • Record what the device does with its working Windows driver, then compare that with the failing Linux driver. The differences give the agent concrete problems to investigate.
  • For his laptop camera, which needed a different inspection method, a second USB camera provided a reference image. He reports improvements from fixes to both the kernel driver and the software that processes the sensor’s output.
  • Check the result on physical hardware. Schaller explicitly limits the scanner comparison to one device and one frame, and says the camera still needs work.

There is a useful wrinkle: while he was working, the upstream Linux scanner project had already added support for the same scanner. He expects to use that driver once it reaches parity. Getting an agent to produce something is not the same as establishing that it needed to be built.

The transferable lesson is to improve what the agent can observe, not just what you ask it to do. A working reference and a repeatable comparison turn an open-ended guessing exercise into a testable engineering task; the human still supplies the hardware and judges the result.

The 193-comment thread on Hacker News adds other reported experiments, a verification technique, and limits to the optimistic reading.

What the thread adds

  • valdiorn — “I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn’t just making “something similar” but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.”
  • thrawoway14159 — “I paid someone on Upwork to trace the schematics into KiCad. Had LLM agents turn those into Verilog models. Lots of little mistakes had to be found and fixed at this point, it took months…”
  • rmnclmnt — “A few weeks ago, I had Claude develop a CUPS driver running over a Bluetooth connection for the mini photo printer Canon Zoemini 2: works great on Linux (NixOS), even though Canon only bothered to only support smartphones, never desktops!”
  • MisterMunchkin — “They’re really locked down now because of people removing their spyware. Encrypted hardware, signed software.”
  • Doohickey-d — “I’m sure they’re also using AI to build those infotainment systems these days, so I don’t think the stability / usability somehow magically comes from the use of AI.”

These are reports and opinions from pseudonymous handles, not independently verified results. HN publishes no per-comment scores; ordering is HN’s ranking, and this selection is a slice of the thread, not a consensus.