Christian Schaller, a Red Hat engineering director and longtime GNOME and Fedora contributor, had a box of old family negatives to digitize and a scanner that wouldn’t talk to Linux. He’d bought the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i because it was listed as supported, then discovered that the manufacturer had swapped in a chipset no Linux driver recognized. He tried getting Claude Code to produce a working driver and got nowhere for a long time, so he eventually set the project aside for a few months.

When he returned to the project, Schaller tried a different approach. Within hours, he had his first recognizable scan. A few days later, the driver supported infrared scanning, too.

Schaller has since released the underlying approach as an open-source project called hw-harness under an MIT license. It bundles the tooling for capturing how a device behaves, comparing a working implementation against a broken one, and giving a coding agent the information it needs to work on hardware that Linux doesn’t support yet.

Schaller got the idea from a post on X by Tom Crider, better known as Glorious Eggroll, who had used an AI agent to fix a mouse driver by giving it access to a Windows machine. Schaller fed the post to Claude and asked it to build a similar setup for his scanner.

In his account on Wednesday , Schaller described the painstaking process of piecing together undocumented device protocols from USB captures, register values, and control transfers. ” His earlier attempts to build a SANE backend with Claude had stalled because the agent had no working driver to compare against.

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