Comment by jiggawatts
6 days ago
As a random example of a "hard" problem solved by AI that I couldn't have realistically done myself, despite having decades of wide industry experience:
Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol from a binary executable.
I heard about people finding security vulnerabilities in compiled code with the combination of Claude Mythos wired up to a disassembler like NSA's Ghidra. Someone here mentioned that GPT 5.5 "extra high" is just as capable, I had a problem to solve, spare token quota for the week, so... I gave it a go.
My problem was that I'm working with a product that uses a legacy 1990s style network appliance output log format that is proprietary, undocumented, and has no publicly available decoders other than an app by the same vendor, and that app has fundamental limitations. (I.e.: it's nothing like Splunk or Elastic.)
Codex with a Ghidra MCP bridge figured it all out: the framing, bit and byte packing, endian order, field names, data types, etc. It made me a neat little protocol parser in a modern language that I can use to spit out something sane like NDJSON or OTLP protobufs.
There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise!
> There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise!
I think you could have. However I don't think you would have - there is a big difference. It is a lot of work to to that, and people who try normally give up. However if your boss told you could have. Note that I suspect from your story this is more like give this to a dozen people and in 2 years you get results - at a cost of several million dollars.
Of course, there is a philosophical difference between "impossible" and "intractable", but to a business with a budget and a schedule there isn't.