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OpenAI is good at unminifying code

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Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#211

Post by cjf101 »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #166
cal85 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you’re downplaying the obfuscatory power of name-mangling. Reversing that (giving everything meaningful names) is surely a difficult problem?

I would say the actual difficulty greatly varies. It is generally easy if you have a good guess about what the code would actually do. It would be much harder if you have nothing to guess, but usually you should have something to start with. Much like debugging, you need a detective mindset to be good at reverse engineering, and name mangling is a relatively easy obstacle to handle in this scale. Let me give some con…

This is, IMO, the better way to approach this problem. Minification applies rules to transform code, if we know the rules, we can reverse the process (but can't recover any lost information directly).

A nice, constrained, way to use a LLM here to enhance this solution is to ask it some variation of "what should this function be named?" and feed the output to a rename refactoring function.

You could do the same for variables, or be more holistic and ask it to rename variables and add comments (but risk the LLM changing what the code does).

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#213

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #166
cal85 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you’re downplaying the obfuscatory power of name-mangling. Reversing that (giving everything meaningful names) is surely a difficult problem?

I would say the actual difficulty greatly varies. It is generally easy if you have a good guess about what the code would actually do. It would be much harder if you have nothing to guess, but usually you should have something to start with. Much like debugging, you need a detective mindset to be good at reverse engineering, and name mangling is a relatively easy obstacle to handle in this scale. Let me give some con…

I believe the person you're responding to is saying that it's hard to do automated / programmatically. Yes a human can decode this trivial example without too much effort, but doing it via API in a fraction of the time and effort with a customizable amount of commentary/explanation is preferable in my opinion.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#214

Post by pton_xd »

kamaal wrote: post #192
cdelsolar wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is phenomenal for trying new techniques/libraries/etc. It's very good at many things. In the past few weeks I've used it to build me a complex 3D model with lighting/etc with Three.JS, rewrote the whole thing into React Three Fiber (also with ChatGPT), for a side project. I've never used Three.JS before and my only knowledge of computer graphics is from a class I took 20 years ago. For work I've used it to wr…

And we are still at the beginning of this. Some what like where Google search was in early 2000s. As IDE integration grows and there are more and better models, that can do this better than ever. We will unlock all sort of productivity benefits. There is still skepticism about making these work at scale, with regards to both electricity and compute requirement for the larger audience. But if they can get this to work…

I see your point but that specific analogy makes me wince. Google search was way better in the 2000s. It has become consistently dumber since then. Usefulness doesn't necessarily increase in a straight line over time.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#216

Post by TheKarateKid »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #202

I recognized this a few months back when I wanted to see the algorithm that a website used to do a calculation. I just put the minified JS in ChatGPT and figured it out pretty easily. Let's take this a few steps out. What happens when a LLM can clone a whole SAAS app? Let's say I wanted to clone HubSpot. If an LLM can interact with a browser and figure out how a UI works and take code hints from un-mimified code I th…

Honestly, the value in most business software isn't the actual technology. It's the customer base and data held by the platforms.

Someone could already easily clone HubSpot relatively cheaply even if they hired developers, but that doesn't mean it will be anywhere near successful.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#217

Post by thrdbndndn »

jehna1 wrote: post #97

Author of HumanifyJS here! I've created specifically a LLM based tool for this, which uses LLMs on AST level to guarantee that the code keeps working after the unminification step: https://github.com/jehna/humanify

Does it work with huge files? I'm talking about something like 50k lines.

Edit: I'm currently trying it with a mere 1.2k JS file (openai mode) it's only 70% done after 20 minutes. Even if it works therodically with 50k LOC file, I don't think you should try.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#218

Post by dunham »

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #198
jehna1 wrote: post #97

Author of HumanifyJS here! I've created specifically a LLM based tool for this, which uses LLMs on AST level to guarantee that the code keeps working after the unminification step: https://github.com/jehna/humanify

how do you make an LLM work on the AST level? do you just feed a normal LLM a text representation of the AST, or do you make an LLM where the basic data structure is an AST node rather than a character string (human-language word)?

It looks like they're running `webcrack` to deobfuscate/unminify and then asking the LLM for better variable names.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#219

Post by [deleted] »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #166
cal85 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you’re downplaying the obfuscatory power of name-mangling. Reversing that (giving everything meaningful names) is surely a difficult problem?

I would say the actual difficulty greatly varies. It is generally easy if you have a good guess about what the code would actually do. It would be much harder if you have nothing to guess, but usually you should have something to start with. Much like debugging, you need a detective mindset to be good at reverse engineering, and name mangling is a relatively easy obstacle to handle in this scale. Let me give some con…

[deleted]
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