alt Hacker NewsI was able to (through heavy Claude use) successfully reverse engineer a golf cart motor controller that is programmable over USB, but only was supported by a Windows application. Claude walked me through using ILSpy on the .NET assembly, using Wireshark to capture the protocol over USB, and to completely map out all of the functionality in the Windows application. The output was a portable C library and CLI program which, so far, has worked well.
I consider myself kind of an AI detractor but even I'll admit that the tool allowed me to do something it would have taken weeks-to-months to learn to do the hard way.
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Had a similar thought today - maybe we could finally get Linux drivers for more HW...
I recently reverse engineered a binary in a system image of Fabrice Bellard's JSLinux [1]. When given just the binary and asked to reverse engineer, Claude Sonnet quickly identified that some utility functions looked like some Fabrice's (yes, Claude mentioned his name without more hints than the binary) library code, so that helped me to guide Claude to fetch some original source code from a Fabrice project (tinyEMU) to use in the reversed project. That allowed to reach a reverse C file that contains just the original part.
[1]: https://github.com/dolmen/JSLinux-utils/blob/main/export_fil...
ChatGPT 5.6 helped me to fully reverse engineer save file format for a relatively-known game, and write a working serializer/deserializer to edit in-game currency. Reverse engineering is something I've always wanted to learn but now I am starting to question if it is worth learning manual reverse engineering at this age when AI can do it for us.
Ditto (except not being an AI detractor): I used Claude and Codex to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling Devialet amplifiers and then build an iOS controller app to replace the manufacturer's abandoned official app.
The whole thing took about a day, spread out over a week or so. Without AI, I wouldn't have even started the project, because I couldn't spare the time it would have taken.
Doing something similar with audio equipment. I have an older USB midi controller that doesn’t seem to have official support. Claude helped bring it back to life!
I've had good luck using AI to reverse-engineer Bluetooth comms for "smart" products with shitty apps.
Yes! If only humanity limited the use of this tech to these kind of things where it make sense...
I wonder how hard it would be to create various firmware updaters for drives or other devices.
Are we either in a dangerous time where we'll run out of people that have weeks to months, and the resolution/boredom/ability to figure this sort of thing out?
Or are we in a really cool time where we've solved everything so much so many times we can focus on other things?
Tertiary question: If answer two, what the fuck is that?
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Had a similar experience getting a niche app running under wine. The bot had to bring in a different open source renderer, patch dlls, adapt a mapping tool from a different chip architecture to partly map and modify the binary, crazy stuff. Alternatives exist but are expensive, this got it working in an hour when doing it myself would probably be 2 weeks.