alt.hn

8/20/2026 at 12:18:16 AM

Raiders of the Lost Array: vibe-coding a macOS driver for my orphaned Drobo

 https://fetzu.ch/blog/20260819_claudevsdrobo/

by fetzu

8/20/2026 at 1:23:54 AM

Getting another decade out of working hardware by writing your own driver is exactly the kind of project LLMs are good for. Low stakes, well-scoped, and the alternative was e-waste.

by basil_io

8/20/2026 at 7:13:02 AM

That’s exactly what I figured. Even though I feel it should have been Drobo’s responsibility to at least provide a detailed doc before going under.

They must have sold quite a few of these units, and I figure I’m one of the few (saw someone on Reddit reacting to a post to this with their own vibe-coded dashboard – which of course looks eerily similar) customers that went through such lengths to give their device a few more years. Providing an « official » open-source driver might have prevented some more e-wase – and token use!

by fetzu

8/20/2026 at 11:18:21 AM

Didn't know macOS is this "literally 1984", it's a bit wild.

It got me to apply some slop of my own. Supposedly there's some new provisioning scheme that'd allow the author to not have to disable SIP: https://developer.apple.com/help/account/provisioning-profil...

by perching_aix

8/20/2026 at 12:49:12 PM

Didn't know about this, thank you. I'll look into it.

by fetzu

8/20/2026 at 1:56:29 PM

Let me know if it worked out in the end, would be cool if it did.

by perching_aix

8/20/2026 at 7:07:31 PM

It totally did work! I updated the apps and the docs (and the blog post) to reflect this. It is pretty self-involved and requires an active Apple Developer subscription – but it does get everything running without disabling SIP.

Thanks again for the tip ;).

by fetzu

8/20/2026 at 7:19:39 PM

Oh neat, cheers. Credit to GPT 5.6 Sol for actually unearthing this on my behalf, too. :)

by perching_aix

8/20/2026 at 1:25:37 AM

[flagged]

by moribvndvs

8/20/2026 at 12:59:47 PM

You're not alone.

My guess is that both interfaces where claimed (by a driver) already, so it's impossible to bypass (hence "back doors"), as the goal was to send commands directly to the hardware.

But it's hard to derive that conclusion from context alone, the style is so fucking annoying to read.

by antx

8/20/2026 at 3:41:02 AM

>> I also ruled out the back doors: one USB interface, one LUN, both claimed.

>What the fuck does this sentence even mean? Opus’ tone and style is nauseating.

Seems pretty clear to me.

Nothing exposed beyond the expected surface.

Whining about everything being AI, is worse than the AI itself. Especially when the blog post as a whole is clearly human written. OVERWHELMINGLY so

The actual AI stuff in the article is clearly called out and delineated.

by k_roy

8/20/2026 at 10:51:56 AM

You’re referencing an argument I never made. I have no problem with the author’s post, I was very specifically complaining about Opus’ barely coherent style of prose.

by moribvndvs

8/20/2026 at 12:46:48 PM

You were specifically complaining about Opus’ nauseating style of prose, by calling out a sentence by the author you didn’t immediately comprehend?

by k_roy

8/20/2026 at 12:55:36 PM

Except that you're wrong. The referenced sentence is in a quote block, written by Opus.

by antx

8/20/2026 at 7:14:01 AM

I’ll take the « OVERWHELMINGLY » as a compliment, I guess ;).

by fetzu