Raiders of the Lost Array: vibe-coding a macOS driver for my orphaned Drobo
fetzu.chGetting 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.
That’s exactly what I figured. Even though I feel it should have been Drobo’s responsibility to at least provide a detailed doc before going under.
They must have sold quite a few of these units, and I figure I’m one of the few (saw someone on Reddit reacting to a post to this with their own vibe-coded dashboard – which of course looks eerily similar) customers that went through such lengths to give their device a few more years. Providing an « official » open-source driver might have prevented some more e-wase – and token use!
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...
Didn't know about this, thank you. I'll look into it.
Let me know if it worked out in the end, would be cool if it did.
It totally did work! I updated the apps and the docs (and the blog post) to reflect this. It is pretty self-involved and requires an active Apple Developer subscription – but it does get everything running without disabling SIP.
Thanks again for the tip ;).
Oh neat, cheers. Credit to GPT 5.6 Sol for actually unearthing this on my behalf, too. :)