Dev taps Claude Code to craft custom printer driver for macOS

There's a new and very helpful use case for AI coding agents: designing drivers for devices, such as old printers, that were never meant to work with a particular operating system.

Kuber Mehta, a New Delhi, India-based developer and founder of PolyThink, has published an account of how he coaxed Anthropic's Claude Code into creating a macOS driver for his HP Laser 1008a, for which HP offers only Windows and Linux drivers.

"My HP Laser 1008a is a rebadged Samsung host-based printer that speaks a proprietary raster language (SPL3), and it has no macOS driver and no AirPrint," Mehta explained in a blog post.

"So on paper it just does not print from a Mac.

This is the (lightly redacted) transcript of me and Claude Code getting it working anyway." The GitHub repo for the driver – published under an open source MIT license – outlines the problem, which is that none of the common connection options work.

There's no support for AirPrint, PostScript, or PCL (Printer Command Language), and SPL/QPDL drivers didn't work.

What Mehta and Claude did was create a patch to SpliX, an open source driver for SPL2- and SPLc-based printers made by Samsung, Xerox, Dell, Lexmark, and Toshiba.

Mehta's series of social media posts about the project appears to have touched a nerve.

The discussion elicited appreciation for what people see as a positive use of technology, one that recognizes the finicky nature of printers and offers hope that old devices are potentially salvageable.

Mehta's conversation with Claude Code took around 30-40 prompts and cost about 4 percent of his monthly usage.

It's worth reviewing for anyone unfamiliar with AI model interaction because it illustrates how the model – Opus 4.8 in this case – makes confident statements that have to be corrected and often characterizes its remarks as "honest" (a behavior drilled into Opus 4.8).

The project also serves to validate one of the often-cited benefits of AI tools – that they allow people to participate more broadly in the way they use software.

Writing a device driver traditionally required specialized programming knowledge, and Mehta, by his own admission, "knew very little about macOS drivers but learned along the way." While it's fair to say that AI assistance encourages people to tackle tasks they're not really prepared to manage on their own, the sense of enablement is clearly catching, despite the technical debt being generated.

Others have also used AI coding agents to come up with ways to make their printers more functional.