Armin Ronacher: LLMs gave me the tenacity to hack a CarPlay dongle's firmware
mitsuhiko · x · 2026-09-05
Armin Ronacher writes about how LLMs have unlocked hardware hacking for him. Trying to run custom code on a cheap CarPlay dongle, a model pointed him to CatPlay, a Rust reimplementation of the CarPlay protocol for Carlinkit devices. The Carlinkit Mini Ultra he bought turned out to use a different SoC than the original port — normally a dead end — but with iterative help from Kimi K3 and Sol he figured out flashing and compiled CatPlay for the new chip. His bigger point: LLMs diffuse knowledge in strikingly similar ways, nudging independent builders toward building the same things they believe are their own ideas, because everyone elicits the same latent capabilities from the same models.
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