AI is incredible at making things viable (time-wise) that weren't before.

As an example, to show off my LLM-reverse-engineered-hardware project: a user-space driver and software for an old FireWire to USB box, the manufacturer drivers for which were last updated in 2006 and don't really work anymore on modern OSes (and never worked on Mac). Firewire these days in general is also incredibly buggy (needing legacy drivers for PCIe cards, software that wasn't updated since 2006, etc).

With a modern app, even something written in a few days, is already so much more pleasant to use and less buggy, than _all_ the old options that people were using before.

The hardware is quite unique because it's the only widely sold device(-family) that had a DV (FireWire/1394) connector for connecting mid-2000s camcorders, allowing you to transfer video via USB on computers that didn't (don't) have a FireWire port. And internally it works by packing the digital DV video stream into USB, without converting it, so you get the raw, full-quality video data as it was on the tape, the same you'd get it with a "real" firewire setup.

I guess the downside is that if people find out that this old, unique hardware is useful now, it will become expensive and hard to find.

It's here in case someone ever finds it useful: https://github.com/JonasCz/MarvinCapture