A New Hope: Agentic Harnesses

A couple of weeks ago I was working on a different hardware project- bringing up a RISCV MCU with nixos for assimilation into the Hellas universe- and was marvelling at the unreasonable effectiveness of giving Claude and friends an exploratory prompt, hardware 'in the loop' and letting it run. For those unaware- porting mainline linux to a new device involves connecting the debug pins on the board to your computer and turning it off and on again many hundreds of times. I handed over control of my /dev/ttyACM0 (and the ability to turn it off and on again via uhubctl) and woke up the next morning with a fully functional board- it worked!

SG2002 RISC-V board booting mainline Linux over a debug cable

I was inspired by this success to try the same thing with my Strix Halo machines- mkdir thunderbolt-ibverbs && git init --allow-empty -m init and hand over the sudo-password-less reins to Opus 4.7 and Codex 5.5. I don't want to imply that it was entirely autonomous in this process, but I'd estimate at least 80% of my contribution was prompts like yes, continue or great. lets keep going.