Reverse-engineering is cheap now

jdw64

I personally think what has become cheaper is the cost of documentation. Gen AI documentation is flat and explicit, so I sometimes find it more convenient than human-written documentation, especially for APIs. (Many people criticize AI's distinctive writing style, but I don't really care about style in manuals.) Human-written API documentation, on the other hand, tends to be inconsistent in quality

efitz

I was doing this the last few weekends with some LoRa smart home devices and a thermal shipping label printer. Also this weekend I found out that Claude is better at writing Home Assistant automations than I am and I have been doing it for years.

zuzululu

what are some stuff that people are interested in reverse engineering ? ive never done it before but recently got interested after people started porting mario 64 to the playstation.

ReptileMan

Don't worry in 5 years you will have bootloader locked washing machines with crypto paired parts. That are protected under DMCA. For your own good and protection of course.

txdv

I'm currently writing a compiler (forever garage project) the speed at which Claude is able to debug with gdb what was wrongly generated is insane. I had not much prior expertise so maybe a professional in the field would be able to do it faster, but now people new to the field are able to debug at a very fast pace as well. It looks at ask code generated, understands llvm, can read and instrument gdb, all for 15$ a month

NooneAtAll3

what's the deal with empty half-a-page-of-text posts lately? is this like the ultimate form of "headline is all you need"? I came here wanting to see after-action-report of someone actually using Ai or wtvr for reverse-engineering. Instead I got "I heard it was so. The end"

xyzsparetimexyz

Cheap is a relative term. How many people would pay $5 to reverse engineer a device in their home? There's no way to make a profit off reverse engineering home devices so I expect while this is likely to be one of the most groundbreaking impacts of LLMs, it won't see a ton of adoption until token costs come down.

vanity0

I would love to be able to tweak or have fully customized firmware/mobile apps for all my smart devices, without risking bricking them. Various firmware bugs that I’m sure could be fixed but aren’t, because they don’t bug the manufacturer enough? But they certainly bug me on a daily basis.

tornikeo

...if done correctly. You can reverse engineer websites at a breathtaking speed if you do it correctly. PeachJam.dev took me approximately 2 months to make, for instance. If I had access to Sol from the start it would likely just take 1 month.

rmm

I’ve done this so much. My pool controller. Patio louvres. Fireplace. All these busted apps all controlled using mqtt now to talk to homeassistant for super easy control.

captn3m0

I reversed Super Hexagon these last few weeks and ported it to the Playdate (the yellow console from Panic with a crank): https://old.reddit.com/r/PlaydateConsole/comments/1v1zxmt/i_... The multiplier comes from being able to design arbitrary fast feedback loops - Claude wrote Python scripts to do decompilation matching for itself, and then use Frida traces from the original as a verification harness.

xnx

I'll be impressed by this trend when someone manages to replace crappy built in TV OS spyware with something more open like Android TV.