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AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
It's not a good tool for research, it will just generate a hallucination and you end up doing something which does not work or just works somehow, but is not done correctly and will break in the future.
I talked to quite a few people recently at the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference, it definitely was noticed that more contributions are now coming in that do things wrong or in a subtly broken way and the submitting people have no clue.
If you rely on a lying computer for research, then your code will lie to you.
I rely on it to scour the docs, the forums, the codebases for any and all potential solutions and neatly present them to me. I then validate and evaluate myself. Just going with the first thing the AI suggests is lunacy and is exactly what I meant by "people are still discovering best practices".
Or just use Ecosia or DuckDuckGo.
A search engine finds you places to look at and doesn't hallucinate incorrect details.
I know it's perfectly possible to do mainlining of a device and work on the kernel stuff simply by reading stuff, asking people and bouncing ideas while strengthening the community in the process and having fun with other phone hackers.
Υes good luck finding solutions with closed source drivers by using only Search Engines and not at the end of the day...reverse engineering... I mean, technically feasible, but I cannot understand why we skip the HUGE AMOUNTS OF TIME that this kind of work needs to be done. And expertise.
The repository is here with an auto-installer script for anyone interested, the research is here for anyone to study and try to manually implement them to main-line. That's the beauty of open source.
All in all, The device is alive again, so I would need to consume less new electronic devices in the feature so I will protect more the planet with not needing a new phone/smallserver than some data centers that I do not control!
Unless you're doing something extremely common with well-established patterns, search engines have sucked for the past 14 years and been unusable for the past 8. For most of that time I would just refer to official docs, and official code examples, avoiding stackoverflow and other forums since they were just filled with outdated or plain bad info.
Search engines like Kagi might still be decent, but they are few.