Two people wrote a Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini, and the kernel part took three days

Cody Ho and Niklas reverse-engineered the A18 Pro firmware ABI, wrote a kernel driver talking to AGX firmware over RTKit, and built a user-space stack with a custom IR and shader compiler that passes the full OpenGL ES 3.0 conformance suite. Chrome and Firefox run WebGL on it. Minecraft runs at 212 fps. The whole thing took about a month. Ho's write-up says the prototype-to-finished kernel driver stretch was three days, using Codex on GPT-5.6 Sol and later GPT-6 Astra, and that those models were by far the best performers at firmware ABI reverse engineering specifically.

Sit with that for a second. Firmware ABI reverse engineering is the opposite of what the "models only write CRUD" argument predicts. There's no documentation, no Stack Overflow answer, no training corpus of Apple's undisclosed GPU command formats. It's reading binary blobs, forming hypotheses about field layouts, and testing them against hardware that gives you a hang or a kernel panic as your only feedback signal.

But that's why it works. The task is hypothesis generation at volume against a cheap, unambiguous oracle. You can be wrong 50 times and it costs you nothing but a reboot. That's precisely the regime where a model that's fast and often-wrong beats a human who's slow and usually-right. My read is that the limiting factor for agent usefulness isn't how documented a domain is. It's how fast and how automatable your verification is. Firmware RE has terrible documentation and excellent verification. Frontend work has excellent documentation and terrible verification, which is why "it looks fine to me" remains the bottleneck on every UI task I hand off.

Hold this against the SWE-bench audit below. That paper says scaffolds matter more than models. This says the model choice mattered a lot, and names which ones. Both can be true: when the task has a tight verification loop, raw model capability shows through, because the scaffold is just "run it and see." When verification is fuzzy, the scaffold is doing most of the work and dominates the measurement.

The action for builders: go look at the work you've written off as too undocumented for an agent. Binary protocol work, undocumented vendor APIs, legacy formats, proprietary file layouts. If you can write a test that says yes or no in under a second, that category just moved.