You guys are putting too much trust in AI. 
I had nothing but disasters with ChatGPT (paid subscription) for the past 3 months. Several Python based projects are stalled because of its totally unreliable and unpredictable performance.
It writes a few lines of code in 2 minutes and then I spend 1 hour fixing and unfuc**g what it had created.
So, be aware that AI can throw a ton of garbage at you pretending that it has created the best thing since the sliced bread.
Peace.
***soapbox incoming
***
I can understand your frustration completely. AI is not yet at a proficiency level where it can complete extremely complex tasks correctly on the first pass. That said, having gone through this process many times now, I believe there's a right way and a wrong way to go about programming something with AI. I never release
anything to this community unless I have thoroughly vetted it myself with extensive testing, which is the key. The testing and bug-fixing step is not fun at all; sometimes it's a long slog indeed, but it is
absolutely critical to putting together an end-product that actually works as intended. (Even then, there's always a few minor bugs that I still miss!)
Take the AirPort Extreme driver, for example. This is an incredibly complex piece of software. Some people have it in their heads that all I have to do is open up the Claude app on my MacBook and tell it, "Write me an AirPort Extreme driver for Mac OS 9", and Claude spits out a polished, functional product a few minutes later. That couldn't be further from the truth. The AE project required
over two hundred iterations before it functioned exactly the way I wanted it. This meant many, many hours of work across multiple weeks of sessions, and there were many questions that had to be answered during the planning phase before a single line of code was written:
- What kind of encryption will it support? WPA2 only? What about legacy WEP? What about open networks?
- Should we bother porting Apple's original computer-to-computer "ad-hoc" wireless network feature?
- Will the new AE driver peacefully coexist with Apple's original AirPort drivers, or might this cause crashes?
- What about Broadcom chip revisions common to that era? Will we support BCM4306 only? What about BCM4318?
- What about form factors? Will this support the A1026 card only? What about PCI cards or CardBus?
- How/where do we safely store network passwords so that networks can be "remembered"?
- What will the UI look like? Similar to Apple's? Or can we do better with our own design?
Those are just a
few examples of things I had to account for, and answering each one lead to multiple tests to prove them out before I was satisfied. After all, the whole point is to provide solutions and fixes for the OS 9 community that are both functional
and enjoyable to use. There's no greater buzzkill in software development than buggy application that is a pain to use.
In summary,
I know I can't trust AI blindly (and I believe the actual code-writing portion of the process should not be the first step anyway). That's why I think the majority of the work should be spent on planning beforehand and testing/hardening afterwards. That's how you turn AI from an unreliable crutch of frustration into a powerful and effective programming tool.
This site already contains vital information for such a project, but it’s currently quite scattered. It would be fantastic to have a single place where you could look up your specific model and find everything you need. If you could pull this off, it would be a dream come true for anyone who loves this operating system. Keep up the great work!
Thanks! I've been trying to get in touch with someone here on this website about that very possibility, but I haven't heard back. I have an idea for creating an "unsupported G4 wiki" that would contain the sum total of the community's knowledge in an easy-to-navigate format. I'd be more than happy to spearhead it myself, and then open it up to the rest of the community to supplement it, just like any other wiki page. At this point, there's just too much information to rely on sifting through hundreds of forum pages.
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Topic: Sound on a PowerBook G4 12" 867 (PowerBook6,1) (Read 1515 times)
