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Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

As a bit of background, one of my hobbies is helping people recover data from old tape cartridges, such as QIC-80 tapes, which were a rather popular backup medium in the 1990s among individuals, small businesses, BBS operators, and the like. I have a soft spot for tape media; there’s something about the tactile sensation of holding these tapes in my hands that makes the whole process very joyful, even though QIC tapes are notorious for their many design flaws.

It was a “hack” in every sense: your motherboard’s BIOS had no knowledge of the tape drive being connected, and it was entirely up to the end-user software to know exactly how to manipulate the hardware I/O ports, timings, interrupts, etc. People like to compare it to working with a “junior” engineer, and I think that’s broadly accurate: it will do whatever you tell it to do, it’s eager to please, it’s overconfident, it’s quick to apologize and praise you for being “absolutely right” when you point out a mistake it made, and so on. Naturally, I verified and tested the changes it made, and in the process I did end up learning a huge amount of things that will be actually useful to me in the future, such as modern kernel conventions, some interesting details of x86 architecture, as well as several command line incantations that I’ll be keeping in my arsenal.

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