Ask HN: Can a NTFS driver for macOS be vibecoded?

Posted by albert_e on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:49AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Ran into this while swapping external drives between Windows and Mac -- it seems the only reliable way to keep the benefits of NTFS (journaling) and allow writes from MacOS is to use third-party $ commercial drivers.

I am not knowledgeble about what makes a driver so I asked (Gemini) -- and I am told this involves a fairly complex low level OS hooks and bypassing OS protections etc with a lot of edge cases -- so today's frontier models are unlikely to produce a reliable driver implementation.

I was surprised to hear. If we believe the AI marketing shouldn't this be solved relatively easily?

( 3 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Can a NTFS driver for macOS be vibecoded? by sgt on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:04AM (#50334553)

Depends what you mean by vibecoding. You need to deeply understand NTFS and filesystems in order to "vibe code" a driver. In other words, if you wouldn't be able to hand code one (given enough time and effort, of course, which would be tremendous), you wouldn't be able to instruct an AI to do so either.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Can a NTFS driver for macOS be vibecoded? by lidder86 on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:54AM (#50334498)

Quick Google https://github.com/ntfstool/ntfstool ?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Can a NTFS driver for macOS be vibecoded? by pestatije on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:19AM (#50337999)

why choosing the hardest path?...disable write-caching

[ Parent | on HN ]