A Linux developer has cleaned up the R600 driver using GitHub Copilot, keeping AMD's Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series GPUs running on modern Linux.
The R600 driver covers AMD graphics cards from roughly 2007 to 2011, hardware that has had no commercial support for years. Maintaining code that old is exactly the kind of unrewarding work that leads to driver rot: dense, underdocumented, and rarely touched by anyone who wasn't there when it was first written. The developer used GitHub Copilot in what the project describes as "vibe coding" to navigate the legacy codebase and push through the cleanup.
This is a quiet proof of concept for AI as a maintenance tool rather than a creation tool. New features get the attention and the commits; the harder problem in open source is keeping aging code alive as original authors move on. If AI can lower that cost, it might extend the useful life of older hardware well beyond what any single maintainer would bother doing by hand.
That said, AI-assisted refactoring in low-level GPU driver code tends to surface subtle regressions six months after the fact. File this under promising, not proven.