All ideasMore in Hobbies
Hobbies

Write a driver so my old printer works on the new macOS

An old printer orphaned by macOS 27 got a second life: The AI wrote the driver while using its owner as the diagnostic instrument - asking him to judge whether each line was progressively less visible, whether page one's DPI was lower - until the printer printed correctly again.

How it works

  1. Connect the printer and let the AI probe it
  2. The AI writes driver code
  3. Owner runs test pages and reports what he sees
  4. The AI refines line visibility and DPI behavior
  5. Printer works on the new OS

Why it’s worth knowing

The debugging loop ran through a human body: the agent could write the driver but not see the page, so the owner became its sensor - 'was each line progressively less visible?'

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

HobbiesThe AI built its own mail app in 23 minutesHobbiesI cut my bots' wakeups from about 300 a week to about 140HobbiesAn AI assistant traced my family tree past 1,200 people and 13 generationsHobbiesSpark Learned a Writer's Voice From Sent Emails and Saved It as a Reusable Skill

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.