Alright, let's see Codex 5.3 create a competitor to postmarketOS (without just copying the homework of other devs). If you believe in the technology so much, put it to the test, see what it can really do.

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dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Reminds me how one year ago people were saying "sure, GPT-4o can write a function, but try to make it write a whole application"

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ZenoArrow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, AI has developed quickly, but let's see it take on a real engineering challenge, rather than regurgitating boilerplate code.

Writing device drivers from incomplete specs is much harder than "writing a whole application" where the specs are clearly defined and there's a lot more example code to reference. If you believe in AI so much, and believe that it's unreasonable for postmarketOS to not want to use it, put it to the test, prove the doubters wrong, what have you got to lose?

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dist-epoch an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't have anything to win either.

What does a developer who writes a driver from incomplete specs do? Writes some values in some registers, sees how the device behaves, updates the spec. Rinse and repeat. Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.

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ZenoArrow an hour ago | parent [-]

> I don't have anything to win either.

Sure you do, you can prove those that doubt your views wrong.

> Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.

Go for it then, you're not putting in any work into it other than giving it a task to do.

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dist-epoch an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm sure you know what opportunity cost is

	▲	ZenoArrow 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Haha, are you trying to suggest you'll have lost much by putting an AI tool to the test? You seem to think it's powerful enough to do the work of porting Alpine Linux (or equivalent) to new hardware without human intervention (beyond the initial prompt), what exactly are you losing by trying this out? It's not your time, as you would have spent less time on giving a simple instruction to an AI tool than you spent in talking to me. Perhaps the reality is that you know AI needs more hand-holding than this, and the tools aren't up to the task you're thinking of setting them.

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fartfeatures 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fun that you had to caveat it with some hand wavy homework bull. Gives you a nice get out of jail free clause when inevitably an AI writes an OS.

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ZenoArrow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Fun that you had to caveat it with some hand wavy homework bull.

Not really. If AI is just copying someone else's code, it's not really designing it is it. If you want it to truly design something, it needs to be designing it using the same constraints that the human engineers would face, which means it doesn't get the luxury of copying from others, it has to design things like device drivers with the same level of information that human engineers get (e.g. device specifications and information gathered through trial and error).

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fartfeatures 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you suggesting that a human being writes an OS in a vacuum without seeing any other OS or looking into how it is built. That feels a little facetious, no?

	▲	ZenoArrow an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Are you suggesting that a human being writes an OS in a vacuum without seeing any other OS or looking into how it is built. That feels a little facetious, no? No, I'm suggesting in order for it to be a fair test, you need to impose the same restrictions that a human engineer would face. For example, consider the work done by the Nouveau team in building a set of open source GPU drivers for NVIDIA GPUs. When they started out the specs were not so widely available. They could look at how GPU drivers were developed for other GPUs, but that is not going to be a substitute for exploratory work. Let's see how well AI does at that exploratory work. I think you'll find it's a lot harder than common uses for AI today.