Comment by mattmanser
2 days ago
With stuff like this, do you honestly not feel that you've probably been tricked and that someone else actually did this?
Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out.
There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code.
And worse, Google search would have found it 10 years ago, but Google search today would claim there are no results?
I think incredibly specific stuff like this often won't pass the 'did Claude just steal this?' test when you dig into it.
I appreciate where you’re coming from but no, I don’t believe so. I have had Claude do some incredible reverse engineering on very proprietary niche firmware blobs that aren’t generally available to the public. One of the really interesting reasons why I don’t believe that it’s simply regurgitation but rather iterative novel synthesis is because of the dead ends and blind alleys that led to success. It feels a lot more like “Claude has read every tutorial on Ghidra and Radare2, and has memorized the ARM architecture and datasheets for all of these microcontrollers”. Misidentifying, say, which subfamily of processors it is based on the IVT, only to course correct when I give it the VID/PID of the device booted into DFU mode.
One piece of gear, Claude found a hidden and highly useful diagnostic screen. This took a few iterations too. It found the existence of it based on just running “strings” against the firmware image but needed a few rounds of me going “I tried what you suggested but this is what happened instead”. Searching Google, DuckDuckGo, and GitHub for any of the strings that were on that screen or any of the named constants associated with that screen in reverse engineered source led to exactly zero hits.
More entertaining, Claude and I together also nailed down the source of a PTP synchronization bug in a piece of equipment a few months ago using the main UI .exe (written in pascal, of course), an ARM Linux image from the real-time controller in the box, and some pcaps from it interacting with other devices. The vendor released a patch a few days ago, without me having reported the bug.
It was probably done on a foreign language on an archived forum. Claude is the improvement of the internet search box.
I take it….
Improvement over all the assholes that tell you „just google it” after you spent two days hitting the wall.