AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
On one hand you don’t know what the code is doing but on the other hand it’s impossible to write so much code by hand and do any amount of testing for projects this big
LLM code is getting less sloppy and you now have the choice between generating open-source projects which you will never read the code of, or using an artisan coded buggy project.
Nobody has the time to test every single communication protocol manually to see when a camera is able to take pictures or a microphone records audio. LLM’s can do this driver development and even check when the result looks good. There’s soooo much tedious labour which can already be automated.
OP managed to revive an abandoned phone with working drivers thanks to LLM development. That’s a massive win.
If nobody understands the code, then I might as well use proprietary software, at least somebody will understand that code.
Too bad Android is locked down and the android versions on these devices don’t support a lot of modern apps.
You can use Nura (PostMarketsOS) and have the LLM write the hardware drivers for your own phone which are missing from the project. This is often a pretty custom for most phones. Once you get the drivers you can use the rest of the OS like normal.
You can now revive obsolete devices and get them useable. There’s probably some slop in there but the slop is really getting a lot better it would be great if people were more accepting for using LLM’s for extremely labour intensive tedious tasks which nobody would else do anyways.