With Opus 5.5 and Astra, I'm running out of things to ask AI to do. Weekend vibe coding roundup.
Bad computer day
My closet server's network card died and the SSD started getting read errors. GPT helped research the replacement NIC and took care of vibe partitioning and copying the SSD to a spare one.
E-waste recycling
I had a Netgear GS110EMX switch lying at the bottom of my electronic junk box for years. It's a cheap managed 8x1G 2x10G switch that seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, the firmware is garbage. I'm talking mystery control interfaces listening on random ports, slow and flaky web UI, the works.
Thanks to prior upstream board definition work, it's super nice now.
- Recent mainline kernel with thirteen local patches to get the 10G chip and LEDs working. #5 will surprise you (it enables pause frames).
- Custom minimal userspace. The only entry point is an SSH shell with a config CLI targeting agentic use.
- VLAN tagging, spanning tree, port aggregation.
- Reset button and automatic config rollback if I lock myself out.
- Blinks LEDs on demand.
E-waste recycling #2
I wanted the agent to have a full feedback loop, including rebooting the switch. I found a couple of Athom brand smart plugs in the junk box running who knows what bloated smart home firmware. A brief conversation and a few minutes later I had a plug with a nice self-documenting API.
ICFP 2006 programming contest
...we now know that the society, the Cult of the Bound Variable, was devoted to the careful study of computation, over two millennia before the invention of the digital computer. [...] One cannot help but wonder what the Cult might have achieved had they had access to modern electronics and type theory.
The International Conference on Functional Programming holds a programming contest every year. I really enjoyed the framing and the early puzzles they ran for 2006 so I asked the agent to solve everything and make a complete visualized tour (warning: Claude-y prose).
Alley Cat (1984)
Alley Cat is an ancient DOS game where the player controls a feral cat to complete jumping puzzles while dodging hazards to reach the love of his life. Years ago I wanted to make a web page that plays the game automatically but it was just too much work to bother. Well I have it now. This is a heuristic search solver playing the game on an 8088 interpreter.
Is it over for programmers yet?
Mostly, yes. I deliberately picked larger tasks to give the models a chance to fail. My complaints are rapidly approaching cosmetic.
- GPT finds a lot of issues and bugs in Claude's designs and code.
- Claude didn't read my mind and realize I want minimalistic switch firmware without DNS, NTP, DHCP and a real-time clock.
- Required a separate security hardening pass. This ran into security guardrails because I asked the agent to probe the switch directly and only look at the code afterwards.
- Subagents were waiting for hours on brute-force runs on a couple of ICFP 2006 puzzles, until I reminded them that it is unfair to the original contest teams.
- ICFP 2006 writeup took a few rounds of reviews to fix session context leaks and separate human-facing material from caveats and mea culpas.
- Too much respect for backwards compatibility on new projects. Claude is eager to file tasks but hesitant to purge obsolete ones.
- At some point Claude programmed a complex sequence of blinking LEDs and gave me 12 minutes to confirm it by eye. Like an adventure game puzzle.
- I had to tell Claude to look at the Alley Cat solver path overlays to understand what makes for a pleasing viewing experience.