Important to note that this is a comment on this article: https://lwn.net/Articles/1065586/.

“Reversing was already mostly a speed-bump even for entry-level teams, who lift binaries into IR or decompile them all the way back to source. Agents can do this too, but they can also reason directly from assembly. If you want a problem better suited to LLMs than bug hunting, program translation is a good place to start.”

Huh. Direct debugging, in assembly. At that point, why not jump down to machine code?

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sharifhsn 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For the purposes of debugging, assembly is machine code, just with some nice constructs to make it easier to read. Transpiling between assembly and machine code is mostly a find-and-replace exercise, not like the advanced reasoning involved in proper compilation.

	▲	IsTom 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On x86/x64/variable instruction length architectures this isn't always the case. You can jump in middle of an instruction to get a different instruction. It can be used to obfuscate code.

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bombcar 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Decompiled assembly is basically machine code; without recreating the macros that make assembly "high level" you're as close to machine code as you're going to get unless you're trying to exploit the CPU itself.

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9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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