See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344643

my Brother dcp-t230 also doesn't have macos drivers and it's a usb only printer. if i ever get some tokens to burn, i would try the same.

Claude Code is extremely "honest", and uses that word 10 times in that short transcript.

Claude is great at that. I have a usb keypad with no linux version of the app to program it. Since its just a vial/qmk based, claude built me a linux version in qt/python.

Unfortunately this is a very misleading article and headline. I don't doubt the end result - it's useful that it works, but it's not "natively" and, unlike what some people assume, Claude didn't write a driver. It basically used HP's existing proprietary driver in a Linux VM on macOS, and just bridged that to macOS.

It also requires a root launcher that runs code from the user ~/.hp1008 dir, so security is weakened.

[dupe] Discussion, including activity from the dev https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344643

So the critique from the other story holds true - it really is just running the Linux driver inside docker, and (perhaps) dressing it up as something more - though I note the claim on this page is walked back from the original 'writing the driver'. On the other hand, it really did get him printing from his Mac, so in this new LLM results based world we live in it did its job admirably.

I was able to (through heavy Claude use) successfully reverse engineer a golf cart motor controller that is programmable over USB, but only was supported by a Windows application. Claude walked me through using ILSpy on the .NET assembly, using Wireshark to capture the protocol over USB, and to completely map out all of the functionality in the Windows application. The output was a portable C library and CLI program which, so far, has worked well.

I consider myself kind of an AI detractor but even I'll admit that the tool allowed me to do something it would have taken weeks-to-months to learn to do the hard way.

Somehow, I'm not exactly sure why, I got creeped out by Claude's finishing line:

> Thanks for being such a game debugging partner through all the test pages. Enjoy printing, you and the family.

Maybe it's because my own LLM usage is very "Question > Answer" or "Do this > Agent does that" and I never say "Wow, that's crazy it works, thank you!" at the end or such, so I don't see that sort of things, but if I saw that regularly I'd turn me off so badly from using LLMs. I'm not exactly sure where this feeling is coming from though, it's relatively innocent but just feels so inauthentic, I'm guessing because it's simply a machine.