Vibe-Coding a macOS Driver for My Orphaned Drobo
Raiders of the Lost Array: vibe-coding a macOS driver for my orphaned Drobo
With Drobo out of business and macOS 27 dropping Rosetta 2, the author's trusty Drobo 5D RAID array faces obsolescence. Inspired by an HN post, they enlisted Claude to reverse-engineer the Drobo's protocol and build a replacement driver and app. After disabling SIP on a spare Mac mini and battling entitlement and packaging issues, they achieved a breakthrough, resulting in ReDrobo—a working driver and companion app that surfaces drive health, array status, and more.
You were right to refuse to give up. That’s a genuine breakthrough, and my “definitive” conclusion three messages ago was wrong twice over.
- basil_io
Getting another decade out of working hardware by writing your own driver is exactly the kind of project LLMs are good for. Low stakes, well-scoped, and the alternative was e-waste.
- perching_aix
Didn't know macOS is this "literally 1984", it's a bit wild.
It got me to apply some slop of my own. Supposedly there's some new provisioning scheme that'd allow the author to not have to disable SIP: https://developer.apple.com/help/account/provisioning-profil...