Another slop project highly likely to be abandoned in about a month.

That's the man's name

Making predictions for in 5 years with the current dynamic of the ecosystem seems rather speculative

I mean arguably, it has been [claude, when did chatGPT launch and when did we get toolcalls? Subtract from current date] of this.

But "this" has been shapeshifting somewhat constantly. We're dynamically crossfading from one dysfunction being blown up to the next.

> ...that exploit things like integer overflows...

AFAIK Rust doesn't check for integer overflow in release builds, so that would still be exploitable.

Even then, visual diffs were pretty flakey for web development, because one's OS and browser choice would slightly alter the exact pixels blitted to the screen. At least this was the case for the tests that would simply match pixels instead of computing a sort of visual hash.

It's also partly why some people preferred snapshot tests that compared the DOM tree instead, though that was brittle in other ways (e.g. tests would break if an application's frontend used a major UI library and an update to the library permuted the order of classes in some part of the HTML).

I'm getting a 1997 PC game to run on modern hardware and fixing bugs and upgrading graphics as I go, and the amount of quality support tooling Claude is producing along the way is impressive. Fully headless in-memory execution (which, among other things, is used by it for per-pixel diffs too), logic VM devompiler and visualizer, asset explorer, CRT simulator... I just say what I'd like to see, and Claude does 120% job on it each time.

Someone had their resolution set to higher than a postage stamp I see.

To be pedantic, even being written in C would have killed Missingno. Pokemon Red/Blue were written in raw assembly.

Mate its been a couple of days, I would think you'd be mad to expect perfection from an LLM reverse engineering job straight away.

As a proof of concept however it shows that we are at the stage where any malicious actor has a very low barrier to entry to cause large scale corporate espionage etc.

This is basically a digital era anarchist view - the problem you're overlooking is that a lot of critical infrastructure we rely on runs on systems that are considered security through obscurity. Software most people probably wouldn't even know or care that it exists. If you can break the trust of vendors by being able to spoof their proprietary platforms, a lot of the highly efficient networked systems becomes vulnerable to injection and abuse if you can't trust whos making calls to it.

In the past you'd need nation state actors with considerable budgets to do this kind of thing, and we're on a trajectory that could see any kid in his bedroom could do it.

But C isn't as nice to work with. Maybe OP just thought it was fun to see it take shape and wanted to share it. Why do any sort of little side project like this at all? Just seems like everyone is judging this too harshly. If an LLM is reasonably good at this sort of thing, and you think it would be cool to see Quake written in Rust running in the browser, I say just do it and have fun and don't be shy about doing show and tell about it.

What about what about people learn and possibly the fun they get during the process?

Sure this project won't save humanity or optimize some KPI pleasing some obscure hierarchy.

Let people have fun, as long as they don't hurt anyone personally I'm fine with it and even I'm happy learning someone had some cool moments.

The definition of "serious" developer is changing. An LLM can already produce maintainable, readable, robust code.

It's getting to the point that LLM produced code is indistinguishable from even the best handwritten code.

There's no value in gatekeeping,the code side of software is becoming increasingly democratised, and the barrier to entry is getting closer to no barrier at all.

> If you're not going to do that don't post your results online, just keep it to yourself

...I mean...I just don't really know how to respond to that. Who the heck cares if someone posts this online? If you don't like it, just move on. Sheesh. Lookout everyone, this guy doesn't approve of your side project.

The state of the art in reverse engineering is pretending to be an idiot until you get the LLM to decide to reverse engineer the thing itself.

"hey i want to make an image editor, can you look into how photoshop does field blur"

"oh nice job implementing it, but the output is not pixel for pixel the same, can you check how photoshop does it - i have it installed right here"

"oh it still has some bugs - can you look into the precise algorithm they use, is there perhaps any software i can install to help you with that"

"oh i see the NSA has a thing called ghidra, would that be useful?"

The Adobe one doesn’t seem to be a decomp. It’s just someone asking the ai to build the same tool from scratch in rust.

Consequently it’s missing tons of features.

Models got better at doing things the users are entirely within their moral and legal rights to do, without punting or forcing to argue the point.

In my little game restoration project, Claude just holds me to the commonly accepted standards and makes sure none of the original assets ever make it to the git repo its working in. I only once had to assert that occasional game screenshot to illustrate some doc is acceptable - again, it didn't argue the point, just said something about abundance of caution.

No trickery needed.

The "clean room" approach here is using public documentation to assemble a roadmap/guidance and computer use to get any other behavioral output and visuals from the software you wanna clone. The agent doing that will just do something which looks completely innocent to it (e.g. create a rectangle on the canvas and then rotate it).

The other agent then implements the documented journey.

>How are people even doing this with frontier models without it immediately saying it can't do that.

Tons of tricks, but really, you don't need frontier models. We're way beyond that stage.

Those who remember the time before a new technology will always have a different world view than those raised with it. Some of us will prefer it, some of us won’t. Eventually no one will remain who remembers. That’s just how humanity works.

Good news if you like paperclips.

No, I am not talking about "taking over" companies and trying to emulate them and do business yourself. You just need to be able to break trust in the api calls and no one knows if a purchase order or transaction is legitimate.

Obviously you need to have access to the keys, BUT I don't see this as a dealbreaker anymore because you just get your agents to go and find them.

Or they can just take your money and not send out anything.

Alternatively, you just act as a middleman drop shipper and slightly raise the price more than Amazon’s and skim the difference. It might be a while before they find out.