The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-unexpected-effectiveness-of-one-shot-decompilation-with-claude/

40•knackers•1w ago

Comments

knackers•1w ago

I've been experimenting with running Claude in headless mode + a continuous loop to decompile N64 functions and the results have been pretty incredible. (This is despite already using Claude in my decompilation workflow).

I hope that others find this similarly useful.

garrettjoecox•1h ago

What game are you working on?

wk_end•1h ago

Last sentence of the first paragraph says it’s Snowboard Kids 2.

rat9988•46m ago

For his defense, it is missing a "Tell HN"

dpkirchner•26m ago

And it isn't always obvious when the commenter is the submitter (no [S] tag like you see on other sites).

plastic-enjoyer•48m ago

This sounds interesting! Do you have some good introduction to N64 decompiliation? Would you recommend using Claude right from the start or rather try to get to know the ins and outs of N64 decomp?

turnsout•6m ago

This is super cool! I would be curious to see how Gemini 3 fares… I've found it to be even more effective than Opus 4.5 at technical analysis (in another domain).

ACCount37•1h ago

If you aren't using LLMs for your reverse engineering tasks, you're missing out, big time. Claude kicks ass.

It's good at cleaning up decompiled code, at figuring out what functions do, at uncovering weird assembly tricks and more.

amelius•1h ago

Makes sense because LLMs are quite good at translating between natural languages.

Anyway, we're reaching the point where documentation can be generated by LLMs and this is great news for developers.

monsieurbanana•34m ago

Maybe documentation meant for other llms to ingest. Their documentation is like their code, it might work, but I don't want to have to be the one to read it.

Although of course if you don't vibe document but instead just use them as a tool, with significant human input, then yes go ahead.

james_marks•17m ago

I stumbled across a fun trick this week. After making some API changes, I had CC “write a note to the FE team with the changes”.

I then pasted this to another CC instance running the FE app, and it made the counter part.

Yes, I could have CC running against both repos and sometimes do, but I often run separate instances when tasks are complex.

jamesbelchamber•33m ago

This is a refreshingly practical demonstration of an LLM adding value. More of this please.

rlili•27m ago

Makes me wonder if decompilation could eventually become so trivial that everything would become de-facto open source.

Xmd5a•19m ago

This deserves a discussion

ronsor•8m ago

I've used LLMs to help with decompilation since the original release of GPT-4. They're excellent at recognizing the purpose of functions and refactoring IDA or Ghidra pseudo-C into readable code.

galangalalgol•3m ago

How does it do on things that were originally written in assembly?

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