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The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
51–60 of 133 posts
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#52I've been experimenting with running Claude in headless mode + a continuous loop to decompile N64 functions and the results have been pretty incredible. (This is despite already using Claude in my decompilation workflow). I hope that others find this similarly useful.
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Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#53It's worth noting here that the author came up with a handful of good heuristics to guide Claude and a very specific goal, and the LLM did a good job given those constraints. Most seasoned reverse engineers I know have found similar wins with those in place. What LLMs are (still?) not good at is one-shot reverse engineering for understanding by a non-expert. If that's your goal, don't blindly use an LLM. People alrea…
Agree with this. I'm a software engineer that has mostly not had to manage memory for most of my career. I asked Opus how hard it would be to port the script extender for Baldurs Gate 3 from Windows to the native Linux Build. It outlined that it would be very difficult for someone without reverse engineering experience, and correctly pointed out they are using different compilers, so it's not a simple mapping exercis…
FWIW most LLMs are pretty terrible at estimating complexity. If you've used Claude Code for any length of time you might be familiar with it's plan "timelines" which always span many days but for medium size projects get implemented in about an hour.
I've had CC build semi-complex Tauri, PyQT6, Rust and SvelteKit apps for me without me having ever touched that language. Is the code quality good? Probably not. But all those apps were local-only tools or had less than 10 users so it doesn't matter.
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#54Makes me wonder if decompilation could eventually become so trivial that everything would become de-facto open source.
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Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree with this. I'm a software engineer that has mostly not had to manage memory for most of my career. I asked Opus how hard it would be to port the script extender for Baldurs Gate 3 from Windows to the native Linux Build. It outlined that it would be very difficult for someone without reverse engineering experience, and correctly pointed out they are using different compilers, so it's not a simple mapping exercis…
FWIW most LLMs are pretty terrible at estimating complexity. If you've used Claude Code for any length of time you might be familiar with it's plan "timelines" which always span many days but for medium size projects get implemented in about an hour. I've had CC build semi-complex Tauri, PyQT6, Rust and SvelteKit apps for me without me having ever touched that language. Is the code quality good? Probably not. But all…
That's fair, I've had similar experiences working in other stacks with it. And with some niche stacks, it seems to struggle more. Definitely agree the more narrow the context/problem statement, higher chance of success.
For this project, it described its reasoning well, and knowing my own skillset, and surface level info on how one would start this, it had many good points that made the project not realistic for me.
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#56Makes me wonder if decompilation could eventually become so trivial that everything would become de-facto open source.
It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source". > An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is…
But, for example, isn't Cannonball (SEGA Outrun source port) open source?
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#57> The ‘give up after ten attempts’ threshold aims to prevent Claude from wasting tokens when further progress is unlikely. It was only partially successful, as Claude would still sometimes make dozens of attempts. Not what I would have expected from a 'one-shot'. Maybe self-supervised would be a more suitable term?
"one-shot" usually just means, one example and its correct answer was provided in the prompt.
See also, "zero-shot" / "few-shot" etc.
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#58Makes me wonder if decompilation could eventually become so trivial that everything would become de-facto open source.
It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source". > An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is…
Open source never meant free to begin with and was never software specific, that’s a colloquialism and I’d love to say “language evolves” in favor of the software community’s use but open source is used in other still similar contexts, specifically legal and public policy ones
FOSS specifically means/meant free and open source software, the free and software words are there for a reason
so we don’t need another distinction like “source available” that people need to understand to convey an already shared concept
yes, companies abuse their community’s interest in something by blending open source legal term as a marketing term
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#59> The ‘give up after ten attempts’ threshold aims to prevent Claude from wasting tokens when further progress is unlikely. It was only partially successful, as Claude would still sometimes make dozens of attempts. Not what I would have expected from a 'one-shot'. Maybe self-supervised would be a more suitable term?
Meh, the main idea of one-shot is that you prompted it once and got a good impl when it decided it was done. As opposed to having to workshop yourself with additional prompts to fix things.
It doesn't do it in one-shot on the GPU either. It feeds outputs back into inputs over and over. By the time you see tokens as an end-user, the clanker has already made a bunch of iterations.
Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be "source available", if anything, not "open source". > An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified or shared (with or without modification) under defined terms and conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source Companies have been really abusing what open source means- claiming something is…
But, for example, isn't Cannonball (SEGA Outrun source port) open source? https://github.com/djyt/cannonball
No it is not. There is no license in that repository.
Relevant: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/82431
> When you make a creative work (which includes code), the work is under exclusive copyright by default. Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation. Once the work has other contributors (each a copyright holder), “nobody” starts including you.