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olalonde05/15/20253 repliesview on HN

Recently, Gemini helped me fix a bug in a PPP driver (Zephyr OS) without prior knowledge of PPP or even driver development really. I would copy-paste logs of raw PPP frames in HEX and it would just decode everything and explain the meaning of each bytes. In about an hour, I knew enough about PPP to fix the bug and submit a patch.

https://g.co/gemini/share/7edf8fa373fe


Replies

skydhash05/15/2025

Or you could just read the PPP RFC [0].

I’m not saying that your approach is wrong. But most LLM workflows are either brute forcing the solution, or seeking a local minima to be stuck in. It’s like doing thousands of experiments of objects falling to figure out gravity while there’s a physics textbooks nearby.

[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1661

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tralarpa05/15/2025

Interesting that it works for you. I tried several times something similar with frames from a 5G network and it mixed fields from 4G and 5G in its answers (or even from non-cellular network protocols because they had similar features as the 5G protocol I was looking at). Occasionally, the explanation was completely invented or based on discussions of planned features for future versions.

I have really learned to mistrust and double check every single line those systems produce. Same for writing code. Everything they produce looks nice and reasonable on the surface but when you dig deaper it falls apart unless it's something very very basic.

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Helmut1000105/15/2025

Yes, it fells like setting the `-h` flag for logs (human readable).