Comment by JumpCrisscross
7 days ago
“Reversing was already mostly a speed-bump even for entry-level teams, who lift binaries into IR or decompile them all the way back to source. Agents can do this too, but they can also reason directly from assembly. If you want a problem better suited to LLMs than bug hunting, program translation is a good place to start.”
Huh. Direct debugging, in assembly. At that point, why not jump down to machine code?
For the purposes of debugging, assembly is machine code, just with some nice constructs to make it easier to read. Transpiling between assembly and machine code is mostly a find-and-replace exercise, not like the advanced reasoning involved in proper compilation.
On x86/x64/variable instruction length architectures this isn't always the case. You can jump in middle of an instruction to get a different instruction. It can be used to obfuscate code.
Decompiled assembly is basically machine code; without recreating the macros that make assembly "high level" you're as close to machine code as you're going to get unless you're trying to exploit the CPU itself.
i think they aren't saying "it's more effective to debug at assembly level" but just that LLMs might be less dependent on decompilation/RE that tries to recreate high level code (the context is specifically about closed-source programs)