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.

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.

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.

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.