MacOS 27 broke an old printer. Claude wrote it new drivers
An old printer stopped working with MacOS 27. Claude wrote new drivers, using its owner as eyes and hands: did grayscale work, did page 1 print at lower DPI, now reload the paper for duplex. Then it printed again.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user revolvingthrow· Oct 20, 2026
Result Done with very little hardware know-how
“I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Their old printer no longer worked with MacOS 27, so they asked Claude for new drivers. Since Claude couldn’t see the printer, it used them as its eyes and hands: was each line progressively less visible (did grayscale work), was page 1 lower DPI than page 2, unload the paper so it could see the error, then load it again to check duplex.
How it went
The printer works again with the new drivers. They call the printer ‘debugging’ one of the funniest and most WTF situations they’ve been in lately, and say they had very little idea about anything to do with hardware.
Try it yourself with Claude
My [device] stopped working after a [software or OS] update and there is no new driver from the manufacturer. Walk me through fixing it step by step: ask me what I observe (print or display quality, error behavior, connection state) after each change, form a hypothesis, and tell me exactly what to check or try next until you can build a working driver.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
Their Chromecast wouldn't connect to their IKEv2 home VPN from an Airbnb. Told to fix it, Claude found no way to make the existing VPN apps work, so it wrote a new client. About 20 minutes, plus their certs.
Devialet's official app was abandoned. Claude and Codex reverse engineered the amplifiers' private protocol and built an iOS controller in about a day of work. Without AI, they'd never have started.
A Santa hat, a hidden Bluetooth speaker and a cloned voice reading lines Claude wrote. At Christmas it sorted the kids, and declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
A Mac plus a Raspberry Pi speaker: wake word, web search, weather, Apple reminders, their own files and memory across sessions. And you can talk over it mid-reply to interrupt.
No algorithm, no rabbit holes. The child searches and requests, the parent taps Approve, and only approved videos play, with youtube.com blocked. Built entirely by a non-developer with Claude.