His scanner wouldn’t work on Linux — so he let Claude study the Windows driver

Christian Schaller, a Red Hat engineering director and longtime GNOME and Fedora contributor, had a box of old family negatives to digitize and a scanner that wouldn’t talk to Linux. He’d bought the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i because it was listed as supported, then discovered that the manufacturer had swapped in a chipset no Linux driver recognized. He tried getting Claude Code to produce a working driver and got nowhere for a long time, so he eventually set the project aside for a few months. When he returned to the project, Schaller tried a different approach. Within hours, he had his first recognizable scan. A few days later, the driver supported infrared scanning, too. Schaller has since released the underlying approach as an open-source project called hw-harness under an MIT license.

First reported by The New Stack. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.