I have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates". Claude's doing a tremendous job in getting him to grips with what is actually happening in the application, what's relevant, what's not, what's different. I think it's literally saving him days and days at work.

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0123456789ABCDE 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

if your friend has access to the binary and can pull it out to different box, they might get a lot out of a ghidra mcp -> https://github.com/LaurieWired/GhidraMCP

	▲	speff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not well versed at reverse engineering binaries or interpreting C/assembly so ghidra MCP has been an absolute gamechanger for helping me write tools. Once my project is complete, I plan to learn how to do the analysis myself manually and have cc guide me along the way.

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ecommerceguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it would be interesting, once the dust has settled, to do a compare with a less expensive model (time, capital, compute) such as deepseek 4.

	▲	shimman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Any reason to expect that this wouldn't work 100%? It's not like the different LLMs providers are that technically different from one another.

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baq an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

no such thing as closed source software anymore, just fully open and not quite fully open nowadays.

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locknitpicker 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates".

That doesn't sound very impressive. Not being tracked with a version control system is fixed instantly with a git init, git add ., git commit .no AI required.

Covering the app with tests is also something that requires no AI. At most, coding agents can generate characterization tests in broad sweeps, but we are talking about a delta between hand rolling and vibe-coding of a couple of days.

Where LLM shines is helping developers build up an understanding of what is in place. Running /explain on a codebase can quickly provide you with a high level summary of what's in place.

	▲	michaelbuckbee 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The relevancy here is that he's denied the git history, versioning, branches, implicit documentation that even bad source control practices would have given him.
	▲	gcr 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's what the comment is saying. In normal repositories, version control acts as a record of the momentum of the direction the product was taking. If it's just "_old" and "_new," the developer has to read and understand both, which I think is going to be far more time consuming than your estimation.