In 2017, Apple and John Deere famously joined forces in Nebraska to fight an early R2R bill. An Apple lobbyist told Nebraska legislators that passing the bill would make the state a "Mecca for hackers," a talking point that has since been used by various industries to argue that opening up hardware leads to security risks. [1] There is a very real need for manufacturers to lobby through shared organizations because they recognize that a Right to Repair victory for one product is legally and logically a victory for all products.
The problem is that both sides are correct. The core of the R2R argument is about ownership instead of merely "licensing" from the manufacturer. Repair monopolies create an artificial scarcity, destroying economic efficiency, market competition and planned obsolescence (defeating environmental stewardship). A centralized repair model is a single point of failure, weakening resilience and national security.
Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair. Protection of intellectual property isn't just about software piracy and trade secrets, as opening up firmware access creates a cybersecurity nightmare of backdoors, raising environmental and regulatory compliance issues. The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.
The current compromise is a subscription-based access model Memorandum of Understanding, where for a tiered subscription the John Deere customer gets a restricted version of the dealer's software [2]. The "Gotcha" in the MOU is that many farmers feel this was a bad trade because the manufacturer can change the price or the terms of the website at any time — whereas a law would be permanent.
It's America. You should want that. What you don't want is a mecca for criminals and pirates. I'm not sure how fixing my own tractor leads to criminal acts and there are already robust trade rights protections in the US.
> The problem is that both sides are correct.
Isn't the whole problem here the collateral damage caused by the DMCAs provision against circumvention? Then it seems one side is completely wrong and the other side is completely correct. If you own the device then "circumvention" is meaningless. If the device can't operate without firmware then it's inside the envelope and can be circumvented fairly.
> one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair.
Yea we'd have to develop a robust legal system for managing this; however, we could also just use the one that already exists.
"unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair" - I would say this is not the greatest argument. If someone messes with the equipment outside official channel, loses equipment guarantee, so there is no liability on the producer side.
If some firmware is buggy and pose cybersecurity issues, hiding that will not help, as sooner or later someone will discover those bugs anyway (and will turn good old John Deere into B-class horror movie serial killer machine).
So I am not buying manufacturers arguments. If they were honest, they would said openly they want to earn money on overpriced service because CEO wants to earn more and stakeholders are after him.
Not everything is both sides. In fact, both sides is usually wrong and in this case too.
> Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair.
No they dont. This is not even honest argument. There is no liability cascade from bad repair, in normal setup you loose liability when doing own repair. That is it. There is nothing new or obscure about it.
> The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.
As long as it is not mandatory. The moment you make it mandatory, it is about monopoly.
I don't think anybody here is losing their sleep because JD or some other corporation cannot capture more market and regulators.
Heck, if they put in losing of warranty after tinkering BUT made their devices tinkerable farmers would still go for them.
Another point to all those apple apologists claiming how its more moral company than literally any other mega corporation. I take those posts in good faith as simple paid PR (and not utterly clueless folks who need some dumbed down black&white version of reality to survive in it), which should be forbidden here but we all know how upholdable such rule could be.
> Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair. Protection of intellectual property isn't just about software piracy and trade secrets, as opening up firmware access creates a cybersecurity nightmare of backdoors, raising environmental and regulatory compliance issues. The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.
Why was that never a problem in 100 years of existence of vehicles before? Why are we suddently worrying about these "liability cascades" at the expense of market competition?
It is a fair question. The short answer is that the nature of the machine has fundamentally changed from mechanical machines (where parts break) to cyber-physical systems (where code controls physics):
1) Safety. In the 20th century, safety was mostly passive. Today safety is active. For example, vehicles now use ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). If an independent shop replaces a windshield but doesn't have the proprietary software to recalibrate the cameras behind the glass, the car's Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) might see a phantom obstacle at 70 mph and slam on the brakes. Manufacturers argue (correctly in my view) that they cannot be held liable for a car that decides to crash because a third party misaligned its digital vision.
2) Cybersecurity. There was no backdoor to a 1950s tractor because it wasn't connected to anything. Most modern vehicles are telemetric, where they are connected to the internet via cellular 5G. Manufacturers argue that if they provide open diagnostic ports to everyone, they are effectively creating a standardized digital doorway that a bad actor could use to remotely disable a fleet of tractors across the entire farming sector. In their view, right to repair creates a national security vulnerability that didn't exist when machines were dumb.
3) Environmental. If John Deere is forced to provide software tools to access the engine, a farmer might buy a "delete kit" online that uses software to bypass the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF). This allows the tractor to run more powerfully and skip expensive emissions fluid (DEF). Deere is understandably legally terrified that the EPA will fine them as the manufacturer for facilitating emissions tampering. They are using this regulatory shield to argue that the only way to save the planet is to keep the software under lock and key.
4) The 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. This gets interesting. Back in the day manufacturers tried to say, "If you don't use our oil/parts, your warranty is void." The Act legally protected the owner's right to use aftermarket parts. That law was written for physical parts. It doesn't say anything about digital handshakes. Today, a manufacturer can't void your warranty for using a 3rd party air filter, but they can make the engine refuse to start unless a certified digital code is entered by a dealer-authorized laptop.
Can you prove in any way what you say actually materially changes the road safety, incurs any practical liability (proven in court, not conveniently theorycrafted by manufacturers lawyers) and isn't just a convenient excuse for more monopolization and money extraction from clients?
Because it's heck of a lot of convenience that this newfound safety issues result in destruction of market competiton of spare parts manufacturers and repair houses while ensuring practically unlimited margins and payments from the site of customers.
I wouldn't be opposed to there always being a "dumb" car tier where we don't get screens instead of buttons. Can you imagine getting privacy back in the car you bought? No more data-thirsty "assistants"!
You still need a chip to calibrate mechanical part thresholds, and if certain parts are manual geared but autohandled, the chip needs to calibrate and memorise clutch positions.
A few years ago, Massachusetts strengthened (via a referendum question) its automobile right-to-repair law, mandating access to telematics and diagnostic data. Honestly, I'd prefer _none_ of this data was internet accessible - and that I could wipe historical records on change of ownership.
"Commencing in model year 2022 and thereafter a manufacturer of motor vehicles sold in the Commonwealth, including heavy duty vehicles having a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 14,000 pounds, that utilizes a telematics system shall be required to equip such vehicles with an inter-operable, standardized and open access platform across all of the manufacturer's makes and models. Such platform shall be capable of securely communicating all mechanical data emanating directly from the motor vehicle via direct data connection to the platform. Such platform shall be directly accessible by the owner of the vehicle through a mobile-based application and, upon the authorization of the vehicle owner, all mechanical data shall be directly accessible by an independent repair facility"
I live in Japan, and our repair framework feels weak.
A lot of it is based on industry association rules (業界団体ルール), not enforceable regulation. For example, major electronics companies sometimes disclose a parts retention period (部品保有期限), like keeping parts for X years, but that is mostly traditional large companies.
On repair policy/enforcement, the EU and US seem more advanced than Japan. That is why stories like this (farmers pushing back on dealer lock-in and repair access) are interesting to me.
Isn't open source the legitimate compromise solution to right-to-repair? If you're unhappy with buying a closed proprietary product, why not support an open source alternative? Granted current open source farm tractors pale in comparison to a John Deere Model X9 1100, often priced at over $1 million.
I agree. I’m a gadget lover too. But we still have a real problem: for major household products like air conditioners and dishwashers, there usually isn’t a practical open-source hardware alternative yet. Iowa farmers are probably in a similar situation.
I never liked apple,that they openly deamonize farmers is absolute proof of there evil intent.Truely one of the most surreal things I have ever seen or heard of.
The ONLY possible end game is enslavement, technical and legalistic mumbo jumbo not withstanding, with the onlyquestions bieng, who are these people, and how on earth did it come to pass that they can take a stab at
something as diabolicle as this?
2017, Apple and John Deere famously joined forces in Nebraska to fight an early R2R bill. An Apple lobbyist told Nebraska legislators that passing the bill would make the state a "Mecca for hackers," a talking point that has
Do we need right to repair anymore with AI? Could you get Claude to code an entire tractor software and flash it onto your own hardware and put it in the tractor? In other words just use the tractor for it's hardware?
Aside from the legal question whether the manufacturer allows you to do so, I’m pretty excited about somebody vibe coding firmwire to a 35 ton machine with a bunch of big attachments at the back and plenty of ways to mangle the bodies of careless operators without the rpm so much as audibly rising from strain. Should give us plenty of videos to traumatize the next generation of children with a little bit too much internet access at an early age. I feel nostalgic for those days.
(This is sarcasm, pretty please don’t vibe code car firmware, let alone anything more dangerous than that)
As long as you have a sufficient test suite you could probably run a Ralph Wiggum loop and have it brute force it. Creating the test suite would be harder though.
The phrase "sufficient test suite" is doing a LOT of work here. You would need to know what the data from every sensor is supposed to be along with how every piece of the machine is supposed to perform. AI isn't going to be able to iterate into those parameters over night.
I don't think the farmer that just wants to switch his dead light bulbs out for generic ones without waiting for john deer certified tech surely is very proficient in writing a full test suite.
I'm not anti right-to-repair by any means. I'm just saying that "we don't need the manufacturer, just vibe code your own firmware" is not a solution to this problem.
Farmers should be able to swap parts, tweak loads of things in software, etc without software locks. I should be able to do that on my car too. But the way to achieve that is not through spending a few hundreds of thousands of dollars on Opus [latest] and praying that doesn't kill me, that's the part I have an issue with in OPs comment.
I've never been fond of the argument that there should be a professional software engineer certification, but hearing people like you being presented with the potential dangers and just going 'oh yeah just go with a better test suite and you can just wing it' makes me seriously reconsider.
Vibe code administrative systems for your local golf club to your hearts desire for all I care, god forbid somebody will have to stand around a bit longer before going for their 9 holes. But safety critical equipment is not the place to fuck around with the code prediction machines that have existed for 4 years, have been writing more-or-less acceptable code for 2, and will still regularly refer to themselves as MechaHitler or just make up shit. "Yes you're absolutely correct, I was wrong" doesn't help you one bit if you have just been chewed up by heavy machinery, and the fact that people like you exist who go 'oh just a few more more unit tests surely will fix it' is a terrifying thought.
But don't humans make mistakes too? Like are we sure the failure rate of AI with the right checks and bounds is lower than humans, who are flawed machines themselves?
If you need assurances, have a different LLM write the test suite.
'passing this test is too complex, let me find another way to implement your feature successfully'. If you never had this message or similar on opus 4.5, and never saw the resulting code, you wouldn't understand why some software engineer don't trust AI with security.
What a great idea! what could possibly go wrong allowing farmers with no expertise in writing firmware for gigantic farm equipment, overseeing code output from an LLM and then uploading it to the aforementioned gigantic farm equipment?
Let's just ignore the part where this wouldn't even address the problem at hand!
"Farmers" aren't a monolithic lump of homogenous yokels with straw sticking out their teeth.
The Ukranian farming community birthed the cracked and reverse engineered John Deere software now being uploaded into US tractors by US farmers to bypass kill switches, for custom addons, data retention, etc.
#NotAllFarmers are SWEs, great welders, advanced diesel mechanics, pilots, ... but all these skillsets are within or closely adjacent to farming communities.
I don't think he was calling them yokels. Software for farm equipment is very specific field. I don't think it would matter if they were software developers because that mostly means front end and back end web development.
> I don't think it would matter if they were software developers because that mostly means front end and back end web development.
Really?
I've been a software developer since 1980 or so, never ever touched web development .. horses for courses I guess.
Interfacing with machines and instruments, no worries.
Circling back, the farmers I know want to be able to maintain everything they can within their local circle (state and federal) without being forced to reach out overseas to foreign companies such as John Deere.
Eg: Our local farmers co-op run their own rail networks and bulk handling facilities.
> Software for farm equipment is very specific field.
Meh - there's a lot of overlap with avionics, GIS data aquisition, mining equipment (autonomous trucks, trains, processing circuit control), general industrial applications, etc.
I'm a farmer, but I've messed about with geophysical data aquisition across entire countries, industrial control, abstract algebra systems (Cayley / Magma), sheep shearing robotics, and other fun stuff.
That’s not what this is about, it’s about access to dealership level diagnostic software.
But you don’t have to wait for the farmers, you could “get Claude to code an entire car software and flash it onto your own hardware and put it in your car.” Post back here with your results!
You sound naive and people are mocking you, but honestly who knows. Maybe theres nothing holding this back other than AI skepticism.
The proper way to find out is to get some peice of heavy machinery and try it out. Maybe not a tractor neccesarily, but something that presents a similar quality of risks, even if at a smaller scale. Maybe a forklift?
I think its a bad idea so i wont do it, but why dont you?
The critical part of software engineering, verifiability and correctness, is still something AI cant do properly at all. And by that i dont mean testing software against a test suite, i mean making a good and extensive test suite to build software against
Given that, the farmer or vibe coder is still going to have to take responsibility for making sure the software is verifiable and correct. Thats a heavy responsibility with a huge peice of machinery like this, its naive to equate that with making sure your todo list app or even c compiler works.
The economic calculus still means its better for an corporation to take on that responsibility, and be compensated for it. Now we just need that corporation to not be rent seeking dicks, and we could have a good thing going
Half the process of jailbreaking electronics involves reverse-engineering. There's some promising work in that direction, but reverse-engineering is still not AI's strong suit.
Also, you'll actually need to hook up Claude to all the debug interfaces and pins present on the chip you're trying to break.
Also also, if this worked at all the feds would put a gun to Anthropic's head to make Claude refuse to do anything that might break DMCA 1201.
In 2017, Apple and John Deere famously joined forces in Nebraska to fight an early R2R bill. An Apple lobbyist told Nebraska legislators that passing the bill would make the state a "Mecca for hackers," a talking point that has since been used by various industries to argue that opening up hardware leads to security risks. [1] There is a very real need for manufacturers to lobby through shared organizations because they recognize that a Right to Repair victory for one product is legally and logically a victory for all products.
The problem is that both sides are correct. The core of the R2R argument is about ownership instead of merely "licensing" from the manufacturer. Repair monopolies create an artificial scarcity, destroying economic efficiency, market competition and planned obsolescence (defeating environmental stewardship). A centralized repair model is a single point of failure, weakening resilience and national security.
Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair. Protection of intellectual property isn't just about software piracy and trade secrets, as opening up firmware access creates a cybersecurity nightmare of backdoors, raising environmental and regulatory compliance issues. The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.
The current compromise is a subscription-based access model Memorandum of Understanding, where for a tiered subscription the John Deere customer gets a restricted version of the dealer's software [2]. The "Gotcha" in the MOU is that many farmers feel this was a bad trade because the manufacturer can change the price or the terms of the website at any time — whereas a law would be permanent.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2018/02/01/apple-verizon-continue-t...
[2] https://www.deere.com/en/our-company/repair/customer-service...
> a "Mecca for hackers,"
It's America. You should want that. What you don't want is a mecca for criminals and pirates. I'm not sure how fixing my own tractor leads to criminal acts and there are already robust trade rights protections in the US.
> The problem is that both sides are correct.
Isn't the whole problem here the collateral damage caused by the DMCAs provision against circumvention? Then it seems one side is completely wrong and the other side is completely correct. If you own the device then "circumvention" is meaningless. If the device can't operate without firmware then it's inside the envelope and can be circumvented fairly.
> one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair.
Yea we'd have to develop a robust legal system for managing this; however, we could also just use the one that already exists.
> I'm not sure how fixing my own tractor leads to criminal acts
They're probably pre-criming the killdozer or something.
"unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair" - I would say this is not the greatest argument. If someone messes with the equipment outside official channel, loses equipment guarantee, so there is no liability on the producer side.
If some firmware is buggy and pose cybersecurity issues, hiding that will not help, as sooner or later someone will discover those bugs anyway (and will turn good old John Deere into B-class horror movie serial killer machine).
So I am not buying manufacturers arguments. If they were honest, they would said openly they want to earn money on overpriced service because CEO wants to earn more and stakeholders are after him.
Not everything is both sides. In fact, both sides is usually wrong and in this case too.
> Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair.
No they dont. This is not even honest argument. There is no liability cascade from bad repair, in normal setup you loose liability when doing own repair. That is it. There is nothing new or obscure about it.
> The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.
As long as it is not mandatory. The moment you make it mandatory, it is about monopoly.
I don't think anybody here is losing their sleep because JD or some other corporation cannot capture more market and regulators.
Heck, if they put in losing of warranty after tinkering BUT made their devices tinkerable farmers would still go for them.
Another point to all those apple apologists claiming how its more moral company than literally any other mega corporation. I take those posts in good faith as simple paid PR (and not utterly clueless folks who need some dumbed down black&white version of reality to survive in it), which should be forbidden here but we all know how upholdable such rule could be.
> Manufacturers have a strong argument against right-to-repair from the perspective of system integrity and safety - one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair. Protection of intellectual property isn't just about software piracy and trade secrets, as opening up firmware access creates a cybersecurity nightmare of backdoors, raising environmental and regulatory compliance issues. The authorized dealer model isn't just about a monopoly - it’s about a guaranteed standard of care.
Why was that never a problem in 100 years of existence of vehicles before? Why are we suddently worrying about these "liability cascades" at the expense of market competition?
It is a fair question. The short answer is that the nature of the machine has fundamentally changed from mechanical machines (where parts break) to cyber-physical systems (where code controls physics):
1) Safety. In the 20th century, safety was mostly passive. Today safety is active. For example, vehicles now use ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). If an independent shop replaces a windshield but doesn't have the proprietary software to recalibrate the cameras behind the glass, the car's Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) might see a phantom obstacle at 70 mph and slam on the brakes. Manufacturers argue (correctly in my view) that they cannot be held liable for a car that decides to crash because a third party misaligned its digital vision.
2) Cybersecurity. There was no backdoor to a 1950s tractor because it wasn't connected to anything. Most modern vehicles are telemetric, where they are connected to the internet via cellular 5G. Manufacturers argue that if they provide open diagnostic ports to everyone, they are effectively creating a standardized digital doorway that a bad actor could use to remotely disable a fleet of tractors across the entire farming sector. In their view, right to repair creates a national security vulnerability that didn't exist when machines were dumb.
3) Environmental. If John Deere is forced to provide software tools to access the engine, a farmer might buy a "delete kit" online that uses software to bypass the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF). This allows the tractor to run more powerfully and skip expensive emissions fluid (DEF). Deere is understandably legally terrified that the EPA will fine them as the manufacturer for facilitating emissions tampering. They are using this regulatory shield to argue that the only way to save the planet is to keep the software under lock and key.
4) The 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. This gets interesting. Back in the day manufacturers tried to say, "If you don't use our oil/parts, your warranty is void." The Act legally protected the owner's right to use aftermarket parts. That law was written for physical parts. It doesn't say anything about digital handshakes. Today, a manufacturer can't void your warranty for using a 3rd party air filter, but they can make the engine refuse to start unless a certified digital code is entered by a dealer-authorized laptop.
Can you prove in any way what you say actually materially changes the road safety, incurs any practical liability (proven in court, not conveniently theorycrafted by manufacturers lawyers) and isn't just a convenient excuse for more monopolization and money extraction from clients?
Because it's heck of a lot of convenience that this newfound safety issues result in destruction of market competiton of spare parts manufacturers and repair houses while ensuring practically unlimited margins and payments from the site of customers.
The number or flashable control modules in cars?
I wouldn't be opposed to there always being a "dumb" car tier where we don't get screens instead of buttons. Can you imagine getting privacy back in the car you bought? No more data-thirsty "assistants"!
You still need a chip to calibrate mechanical part thresholds, and if certain parts are manual geared but autohandled, the chip needs to calibrate and memorise clutch positions.
Why is this more sensitive than people being able to replace brakes, brake calipers, brake cylinders, headlights, etc. etc?
Why is there now a panic about it?
(Yes, I know the answer is: the manufacturer wants to extract money from it, but let's play this game where we defend corpos.)
A few years ago, Massachusetts strengthened (via a referendum question) its automobile right-to-repair law, mandating access to telematics and diagnostic data. Honestly, I'd prefer _none_ of this data was internet accessible - and that I could wipe historical records on change of ownership.
"Commencing in model year 2022 and thereafter a manufacturer of motor vehicles sold in the Commonwealth, including heavy duty vehicles having a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 14,000 pounds, that utilizes a telematics system shall be required to equip such vehicles with an inter-operable, standardized and open access platform across all of the manufacturer's makes and models. Such platform shall be capable of securely communicating all mechanical data emanating directly from the motor vehicle via direct data connection to the platform. Such platform shall be directly accessible by the owner of the vehicle through a mobile-based application and, upon the authorization of the vehicle owner, all mechanical data shall be directly accessible by an independent repair facility"
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/Cha...
one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair
We already have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
[dead]
I live in Japan, and our repair framework feels weak.
On repair policy/enforcement, the EU and US seem more advanced than Japan. That is why stories like this (farmers pushing back on dealer lock-in and repair access) are interesting to me.Isn't open source the legitimate compromise solution to right-to-repair? If you're unhappy with buying a closed proprietary product, why not support an open source alternative? Granted current open source farm tractors pale in comparison to a John Deere Model X9 1100, often priced at over $1 million.
I agree. I’m a gadget lover too. But we still have a real problem: for major household products like air conditioners and dishwashers, there usually isn’t a practical open-source hardware alternative yet. Iowa farmers are probably in a similar situation.
What has been the result since the complete 2022 jailbreak of all Deere tractor embedded computer controls?
I live near Deere corporate headquarters, and saw their employment advertisements for low-level firmware security experts.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/john_deere_doom/
Nothing, really. You can't build a company on a hack.
I never liked apple,that they openly deamonize farmers is absolute proof of there evil intent.Truely one of the most surreal things I have ever seen or heard of. The ONLY possible end game is enslavement, technical and legalistic mumbo jumbo not withstanding, with the onlyquestions bieng, who are these people, and how on earth did it come to pass that they can take a stab at something as diabolicle as this?
2017, Apple and John Deere famously joined forces in Nebraska to fight an early R2R bill. An Apple lobbyist told Nebraska legislators that passing the bill would make the state a "Mecca for hackers," a talking point that has
We badly need both a right to repair AND to abolish patents. Both would greatly increase competition and reduce prices.
Obligatory mention of the excellent Cory Doctorow's talk on this matter (the title might be confusing):
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...
Do we need right to repair anymore with AI? Could you get Claude to code an entire tractor software and flash it onto your own hardware and put it in the tractor? In other words just use the tractor for it's hardware?
Aside from the legal question whether the manufacturer allows you to do so, I’m pretty excited about somebody vibe coding firmwire to a 35 ton machine with a bunch of big attachments at the back and plenty of ways to mangle the bodies of careless operators without the rpm so much as audibly rising from strain. Should give us plenty of videos to traumatize the next generation of children with a little bit too much internet access at an early age. I feel nostalgic for those days.
(This is sarcasm, pretty please don’t vibe code car firmware, let alone anything more dangerous than that)
As long as you have a sufficient test suite you could probably run a Ralph Wiggum loop and have it brute force it. Creating the test suite would be harder though.
The phrase "sufficient test suite" is doing a LOT of work here. You would need to know what the data from every sensor is supposed to be along with how every piece of the machine is supposed to perform. AI isn't going to be able to iterate into those parameters over night.
I don't think the farmer that just wants to switch his dead light bulbs out for generic ones without waiting for john deer certified tech surely is very proficient in writing a full test suite.
I'm not anti right-to-repair by any means. I'm just saying that "we don't need the manufacturer, just vibe code your own firmware" is not a solution to this problem.
Farmers should be able to swap parts, tweak loads of things in software, etc without software locks. I should be able to do that on my car too. But the way to achieve that is not through spending a few hundreds of thousands of dollars on Opus [latest] and praying that doesn't kill me, that's the part I have an issue with in OPs comment.
I've never been fond of the argument that there should be a professional software engineer certification, but hearing people like you being presented with the potential dangers and just going 'oh yeah just go with a better test suite and you can just wing it' makes me seriously reconsider.
Vibe code administrative systems for your local golf club to your hearts desire for all I care, god forbid somebody will have to stand around a bit longer before going for their 9 holes. But safety critical equipment is not the place to fuck around with the code prediction machines that have existed for 4 years, have been writing more-or-less acceptable code for 2, and will still regularly refer to themselves as MechaHitler or just make up shit. "Yes you're absolutely correct, I was wrong" doesn't help you one bit if you have just been chewed up by heavy machinery, and the fact that people like you exist who go 'oh just a few more more unit tests surely will fix it' is a terrifying thought.
But don't humans make mistakes too? Like are we sure the failure rate of AI with the right checks and bounds is lower than humans, who are flawed machines themselves?
If you need assurances, have a different LLM write the test suite.
'passing this test is too complex, let me find another way to implement your feature successfully'. If you never had this message or similar on opus 4.5, and never saw the resulting code, you wouldn't understand why some software engineer don't trust AI with security.
too late.
What a great idea! what could possibly go wrong allowing farmers with no expertise in writing firmware for gigantic farm equipment, overseeing code output from an LLM and then uploading it to the aforementioned gigantic farm equipment?
Let's just ignore the part where this wouldn't even address the problem at hand!
.. and the farmers with firmware experience?
"Farmers" aren't a monolithic lump of homogenous yokels with straw sticking out their teeth.
The Ukranian farming community birthed the cracked and reverse engineered John Deere software now being uploaded into US tractors by US farmers to bypass kill switches, for custom addons, data retention, etc.
#NotAllFarmers are SWEs, great welders, advanced diesel mechanics, pilots, ... but all these skillsets are within or closely adjacent to farming communities.
I don't think he was calling them yokels. Software for farm equipment is very specific field. I don't think it would matter if they were software developers because that mostly means front end and back end web development.
> I don't think it would matter if they were software developers because that mostly means front end and back end web development.
Really?
I've been a software developer since 1980 or so, never ever touched web development .. horses for courses I guess.
Interfacing with machines and instruments, no worries.
Circling back, the farmers I know want to be able to maintain everything they can within their local circle (state and federal) without being forced to reach out overseas to foreign companies such as John Deere.
Eg: Our local farmers co-op run their own rail networks and bulk handling facilities.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group
* https://www.cbh.com.au/
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131063
> Software for farm equipment is very specific field.
Meh - there's a lot of overlap with avionics, GIS data aquisition, mining equipment (autonomous trucks, trains, processing circuit control), general industrial applications, etc.
I'm a farmer, but I've messed about with geophysical data aquisition across entire countries, industrial control, abstract algebra systems (Cayley / Magma), sheep shearing robotics, and other fun stuff.
That’s not what this is about, it’s about access to dealership level diagnostic software.
But you don’t have to wait for the farmers, you could “get Claude to code an entire car software and flash it onto your own hardware and put it in your car.” Post back here with your results!
[flagged]
You sound naive and people are mocking you, but honestly who knows. Maybe theres nothing holding this back other than AI skepticism.
The proper way to find out is to get some peice of heavy machinery and try it out. Maybe not a tractor neccesarily, but something that presents a similar quality of risks, even if at a smaller scale. Maybe a forklift?
I think its a bad idea so i wont do it, but why dont you?
Give it a shot, I guess. Sounds like you’ll have a big market in Iowa.
because all the shit is locked down and the corpos can use state violence to stop you from doing so if you manage to succeed
The critical part of software engineering, verifiability and correctness, is still something AI cant do properly at all. And by that i dont mean testing software against a test suite, i mean making a good and extensive test suite to build software against
Given that, the farmer or vibe coder is still going to have to take responsibility for making sure the software is verifiable and correct. Thats a heavy responsibility with a huge peice of machinery like this, its naive to equate that with making sure your todo list app or even c compiler works.
The economic calculus still means its better for an corporation to take on that responsibility, and be compensated for it. Now we just need that corporation to not be rent seeking dicks, and we could have a good thing going
Half the process of jailbreaking electronics involves reverse-engineering. There's some promising work in that direction, but reverse-engineering is still not AI's strong suit.
Also, you'll actually need to hook up Claude to all the debug interfaces and pins present on the chip you're trying to break.
Also also, if this worked at all the feds would put a gun to Anthropic's head to make Claude refuse to do anything that might break DMCA 1201.
Law is code.
1. Yes 2. Maybe, probably not though. It's complicated 3. No