Linux devs let GitHub Copilot play necromancer on 20-year-old Radeon drivers

Developer Gert Wollny pushed 59 commits to the R600 driver, which acts as the digital heartbeat for AMD and ATI cards ranging from the Radeon HD 2000 to HD 6000 series. This ancient silicon, which debuted when most of us were still using flip phones, was suffering from a critical lack of human interest. By utilizing GitHub Copilot to refactor the shader compiler, the team managed to scrub through decades of dusty logic without losing their minds.

Every single commit now proudly wears an Assisted-by badge, acting as a digital confession that a machine did the heavy lifting. The process relies on what some call vibe-coding—letting the AI handle the tedious, soul-crushing boilerplate while the human dev keeps the wheels from falling off. This essentially breathes new life into hardware that was effectively abandoned by its creators over a decade ago.

If the future of software maintenance is just letting fancy autocomplete keep our legacy tech from turning into expensive paperweights, then we might as well embrace the inevitable robot overlords. Watching code from 2007 be optimized by a model trained on the entire internet is a strange kind of digital reincarnation that makes one wonder if humans are becoming obsolete or just incredibly efficient at delegating their existential dread.

Source: Tom's Hardware