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Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

words.filippo.io

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Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#21

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mccoyb wrote: post #16
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree with this sentiment as well and keep coming back to it. What I want is more of an actual copilot which works in a more paired way and forces me to interact with each of its changes and also involves me more directly in them, and teaches me about what it's doing along the way, and asks for more input. A more socratic method, and more augmentic than "agentic". Hell, if anybody has investment money an…

I'm working on such a thing, but I'm not interested in money, nor do I have money to offer - I'm interested in a system which I'm proud of. What are your motivations? Interested in your work: from your public GitHub repos, I'm perhaps most interested in `moor` -- as it shares many design inclinations that I've leaned towards in thinking about this problem.

Unfortunately... mooR is my passion project, but I also need to get paid, and nobody is paying me for that.

I'm off work right now, between jobs and have been working 10, 12 hours a day on it. That will shortly have to end. I applied for a grant and got turned down.

My motivations come down to making a living doing the things I love. That is increasingly hard.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#22

Post by jack_tripper »

simonw wrote: post #11

Using coding agents to track down the root cause of bugs like this works really well: > Three out of three one-shot debugging hits with no help is extremely impressive. Importantly, there is no need to trust the LLM or review its output when its job is just saving me an hour or two by telling me where the bug is, for me to reason about it and fix it. The approach described here could also be a good way for LLM-skepti…

>Have the coding agents do the work of digging around hunting down those frustratingly difficult bugs - don't have it write code on your behalf.

Why? Bug hunting is more challenging and cognitive intensive than writing code.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#23

Post by sega_sai »

SamInTheShell wrote: post #15
wdfx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini and it's tooling is absolute shit. The LLM itself is barely usable and needs so much supervision you might as well do the work yourself. Then couple that with an awful cli and vscode interface and you'll find that it's just a complete waste of time. Compared to the anthropic offering is night and day. Claude gets on with the job and makes me way more productive.

> Gemini and it's tooling is absolute shit. Which model were you using? In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro is just as good as Claude Sonnet 4 and 4.5. It's literally what I use as a fallback to wrap something up if I hit the 5 hour limit on Claude and want to just push past some incomplete work. I'm just going to throw this out there. I get good results from a truly trash model like gpt-oss-20b (quantized at 4bits). The…

I share the same opinion on Gemini cli. Other than for simplest tasks it is just not usable, it gets stuck in loops, ignores instructions, fails to edit files. Plus it just has a plenty of bugs in the cli that you occasionally hit. I wish I could use it rather than pay an extra subscription for Claude Code, but it is just in a different league (at least as recently as couple of weeks ago)

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#24

Post by jamesponddotco »

delaminator wrote: post #10

> For example, how nice would it be if every time tests fail, an LLM agent was kicked off with the task of figuring out why, and only notified us if it did before we fixed it? You can use Git hooks to do that. If you have tests and one fails, spawn an instance of claude a prompt -p 'tests/test4.sh failed, look in src/ and try and work out why' $ claude -p 'hello, just tell me a joke about databases' A SQL query walks…

This could probably be implemented as a simple Bash script, if the user wants to run everything manually. I might just do that to burn some time.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#25

Post by ay »

lordnacho wrote: post #14

I'm not surprised it worked. Before I used Claude, I would be surprised. I think it works because Claude takes some standard coding issues and systematizes them. The list is long, but Claude doesn't run out of patience like a human being does. Or at least it has some credulity left after trying a few initial failed hypotheses. This being a cryptography problem helps a little bit, in that there are very specific keywo…

> Claude doesn't run out of patience like a human being does.

It very much does! I had a debugging session with Claude Code today, and it was about to give up with the message along the lines of “I am sorry I was not able to help you find the problem”.

It took some gentle cheering (pretty easy, just saying “you are doing an excellent job, don’t give up!”) and encouragement, and a couple of suggestions from me on how to approach the debug process for it to continue and finally “we” (I am using plural here because some information that Claude “volunteered” was essential to my understanding of the problem) were able to figure out the root cause and the fix.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#27

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

cluckindan wrote: post #26

So the ”fix” includes a completely new function? In a cryptography implementation? I feel like the article is giving out very bad advice which is going to end up shooting someone in the foot.

The article even states that the solution claude proposed wasn't the point. The point was finding the bug.

AI are very capable heuristics tools. Being able to "sniff test" things blind is their specialty.

i.e. Treat them like an extremely capable gas detector that can tell you there is a leak and where in the plumbing it is, not a plumber who can fix the leak for you.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#28

Post by lordnacho »

ay wrote: post #25
lordnacho wrote: post #14

I'm not surprised it worked. Before I used Claude, I would be surprised. I think it works because Claude takes some standard coding issues and systematizes them. The list is long, but Claude doesn't run out of patience like a human being does. Or at least it has some credulity left after trying a few initial failed hypotheses. This being a cryptography problem helps a little bit, in that there are very specific keywo…

> Claude doesn't run out of patience like a human being does. It very much does! I had a debugging session with Claude Code today, and it was about to give up with the message along the lines of “I am sorry I was not able to help you find the problem”. It took some gentle cheering (pretty easy, just saying “you are doing an excellent job, don’t give up!”) and encouragement, and a couple of suggestions from me on how…

That's interesting, that only happened to me on GPT models in Cursor. It would apologize profusely.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#30

Post by qa34514324 »

simonw wrote: post #11

Using coding agents to track down the root cause of bugs like this works really well: > Three out of three one-shot debugging hits with no help is extremely impressive. Importantly, there is no need to trust the LLM or review its output when its job is just saving me an hour or two by telling me where the bug is, for me to reason about it and fix it. The approach described here could also be a good way for LLM-skepti…

I have tested the AI SAST tools that were hyped after a curl article on several C code bases and they found nothing.

Which low level code base have you tried this latest tool on? Official Anthropic commercials do not count.

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