helpful

Agree with this. I'm a software engineer that has mostly not had to manage memory for most of my career.

I asked Opus how hard it would be to port the script extender for Baldurs Gate 3 from Windows to the native Linux Build. It outlined that it would be very difficult for someone without reverse engineering experience, and correctly pointed out they are using different compilers, so it's not a simple mapping exercise. It's recommendation was not to try unless I was a Ghrida master and had lots of time in my hands.

Are they not performing well because they are trained to be more generic, or is the task too complex? It seems like a cheap problem to fine-tune.

It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source".

> An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is "open source" cause they share the code and then having a license that says you can't use any part of it in any way.

Similarly if you ever use that software or depending on where you downloaded it from, you might have agreed not to decompile or read the source code. Using that code is a gamble.

I wonder when you're never going to run expensive software on your own CPU.

It'll either all be in the cloud, so you never run the code...

Or it'll be on a chip, in a hermetically sealed usb drive, that you plug in to your computer.

That's definitely a possible future abstraction and one are about the future of technology I'm excited about.

First we get to tackle all of the small ideas and side projects we haven't had time to prioritize.

Then, we start taking ownership of all of the software systems that we interact with on a daily basis; hacking in modifications and reverse engineering protocols to suit our needs.

Finally our own interaction with software becomes entirely boutique: operating systems, firmware, user interfaces that we have directed ourselves to suit our individual tastes.

This day will arrive.

And it will be great for retro game preservation.

Having more integrated tools and tutorials on this would be awesome.

Yes, I believe it will. What I predict will happen is that most commercial software will be hosted and provided through "trusted" platforms with limited access, making reverse engineering impossible.

When the decompilation like that is trivial, so is recreation without decompilation. It implies the LLM know exactly how thins work.

This deserves a discussion

It wouldn't fit most of the current LLM cloud providers narrative about privacy and copyright either, so, not sure they would be as cooperative with a prosecutor as they are today with lawmakers and right holders.

"one-shot" usually just means, one example and its correct answer was provided in the prompt.

See also, "zero-shot" / "few-shot" etc.

Meh, the main idea of one-shot is that you prompted it once and got a good impl when it decided it was done. As opposed to having to workshop yourself with additional prompts to fix things.

It doesn't do it in one-shot on the GPU either. It feeds outputs back into inputs over and over. By the time you see tokens as an end-user, the clanker has already made a bunch of iterations.

The article is a useful resource for setting up automated flows, and Claude is great at assembly. Codex less so, Gemini is also good at assembly. Gemini will happily hand roll x86_64 bytecode. Codex appears optimized for more "mainstream" dev tasks, and excels at that. If only Gemini had a great agent...

I've been using Claude for months with Ghidra. It is simply amazing.

Makes sense because LLMs are quite good at translating between natural languages.

Anyway, we're reaching the point where documentation can be generated by LLMs and this is great news for developers.

One thing I don't annoying in really old sources is that sometimes you can't go function by function, because the code will occasionally just use a random register to pass results. Passing the whole file works better at that point.

This sounds interesting! Do you have some good introduction to N64 decompiliation? Would you recommend using Claude right from the start or rather try to get to know the ins and outs of N64 decomp?

What game are you working on?

This is super cool! I would be curious to see how Gemini 3 fares… I've found it to be even more effective than Opus 4.5 at technical analysis (in another domain).