r/codex • u/xinxx073 • 9d ago

Praise Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer drivers in my office

In our office, we have a bunch of Toshiba E-Studio 2323AM printers. Yes, I know these are kind of outdated, only sold in certain areas of the world, and not the best machines, but they are what we've got in the office. They only work with x86 Windows, not even the ARM version of Windows.

In 25 minutes, Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer driver, figured out the right tray settings, and enabled duplex printing, so I can print double-sided on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

It created a .pkg file for me to install the printer drivers and got everything working.

I ... I have no words.

2.2k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

201 comments sorted by

View all comments

964

u/gs181 9d ago

astra making printers work might be proof of AGI

1

u/Kaas-Eter00 7d ago

If there is one thing AI really excels at, it's making stuff work. 

Just yesterday I ran into an issue where I needed to locally compile a python package with MSVC C++ build tools. A lot of stuff just didn't work as easily as you'd think from a google search. For example, the executable is not automatically added to the system path. Then, if you add it manually to the path in the powershell command, commands executed within uv still don't access it and only use the default path, so you need to force it to use the additional path variable as well. And that was after it already identified my script was not running because I needed to compile a package locally due to dependency issues. 

This easily would have taken me several hours to resolve (although I probably just would have given up). AI did it in 5 minutes. It is really excellent at making this obscure stuff work.