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 keywords that might hint at a solution, but from my skim of the article, it seems like it was mostly a good old coding error, taking the high bits twice.

The standard issues are just a vague laundry list:

- Are you using the data you think you're using? (Bingo for this one)

- Could it be an overflow?

- Are the types right?

- Are you calling the function you think you're calling? Check internal, then external dependencies

- Is there some parameter you didn't consider?

And a bunch of others. When I ask Claude for a debug, it's always something that makes sense as a checklist item, but I'm often impressed by how it diligently followed the path set by the results of the investigation. It's a great donkey, really takes the drudgery out of my work, even if it sometimes takes just as long.