I have an Anker PowerConf C200 webcam.
It is a solid little webcam, and one of the nice things about it is that it supports a few genuinely useful settings, especially Field of View. You can change how wide the camera frames you, which is great if you want a tighter shot or a wider view of the room.
There was just one problem: I run Linux. Yes, really. And I have for a long time.
Anker only exposes those settings through its desktop software on Windows and macOS. On Linux, the camera works, but the vendor-specific settings are basically locked away.
What made this more annoying is that I already knew the setting persisted on the device itself. If I changed the FOV on a Windows or Mac machine, unplugged the camera, and plugged it back into Linux, the new setting stayed. So clearly this was not some OS-only feature. The camera was storing state. I just needed a way to talk to it.
So I gave Codex a simple prompt:
I have an Anker PowerConf C200 Web Cam. I'm on Linux and can't set the Field of View. Figure it out and write a small CLI to set it.
About 20 minutes later, it had done it.
Then I asked it to keep going, because FOV was not the only interesting knob on this thing. There were other features that also were not exposed cleanly on Linux unless you knew exactly how the device worked. About 10 minutes after that, I had a repo, code, and binaries ready to run:
erans/anker-powerconf-c200-linux-tools
That part was useful.
The more interesting part was how it got there.
Behind the scenes, Codex downloaded the macOS version of the Anker software and went through the binaries and dynamic libraries looking for strings and clues that could reveal how the vendor-specific controls worked. From there, it was able to identify the control path and turn that into a Linux CLI.
That is the impressive part.
People sometimes talk about coding agents as if the magic is just that they write code faster. That is useful, but it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is giving an agent a messy real-world problem with incomplete documentation, a vendor app that only exists on the wrong operating systems, and hardware that clearly supports a feature but hides it behind proprietary software, and then watching it work backward from the artifacts until it finds the control surface.
This was not “write me a CRUD app.”
This was: go out to town on this and figure it out.
And it did.
I ended up with something practical that I can actually use on Linux instead of a workaround that depends on occasionally borrowing a Mac or Windows machine just to change webcam settings.
The repo is here if you want to try it:
https://github.com/erans/anker-powerconf-c200-linux-tools
What stuck with me is not that it wrote a CLI.
It is that it figured something out.
Thank you Dan Shapiro for the inspiration.