Comment by simianwords

Comment by simianwords 20 hours ago

This is one of the more true and balanced articles.

On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook.

A lot of software tasks are “migrate X to Y” and this is a perfect job for AI.

The workflow is generally straightforward - map the old thing to the new thing and verify that the new thing works the same way. Most of this can be automated using AI.

Wanna migrate codebase from C to Rust? I definitely think it should be possible autonomously if the code base is small enough. You do have to ask the AI to intelligently come up with extensive way to verify that they work the same. Maybe UI check, sample input and output check on API and functionality check.

akiselev 20 hours ago

> On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook.

It's scary how good it's become with Opus 4.5. I've been experimenting with giving it access to Ghidra and a debugger [1] for reverse engineering and it's just been plowing through crackmes (from sites like crackmes.one where new ones are released constantly). I haven't bothered trying to have it crack any software but I wouldn't be surprised if it was effective at that too.

I'm also working through reverse engineering several file formats by just having it write CLI scripts to export them to JSON then recreate the input file byte by byte with an import command, using either CLI hex editors or custom diff scripts (vibe coded by the agent).

I still get routinely frustrated trying to use it for anything complicated but whole classes of software development problems have been reduced to vibe coding that feedback loop and then blowing through Claude Max rate limits.

[1] Shameless plug: https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli https://github.com/akiselev/debugger-cli

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rubenflamshep 16 hours ago

I'm in the same loop where I find the more access I give it to systems and feedback mechanisms the more powerful it is. There's a lot of leverage in building those feedback systems. With the obvious caveat about footguns :P
Gave one of the repos a star as it's a cool example of what people are building with AI. Most common question on HN seems to be "what are people building". Well, stuff like this.

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- akiselev 15 hours ago
  
  > Most common question on HN seems to be "what are people building". Well, stuff like this.
  Hear, hear! I’ve got my altium-cli repo open source in Github as well, which is a vibe coded CLI for editing vibe reverse engineered Altium PCB projects. It’s not yet ready for primetime (I’m finishing up the file format reverse engineering this weekend) and the code quality is probably something twelve year old me would have been embarrassed by, but I can already use it and Claude/Gemini to automate a lot of the tedious parts of PCB design like part selection and footprints. I’m almost to the point where Claude Code can use it for the entire EE workflow from part selection to firmware, minus the PCB routing which I still do by hand.
  I just ain’t wasting time blogging about it so unless someone stumbles onto it randomly by lurking on HN, they won’t know that Claude Code can now work on PCBs.
  
  Reply View | 2 replies
  
  rubenflamshep 10 hours ago
  
  How much of an ECE background do you have? I've also thought about dabbling in LLM-assisted PCB stuff but felt like I was lacking too much of a foundation to get started (no ECE background at all)
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  akiselev 7 hours ago
  
  I'm self taught but used to work as an EE professionally doing high speed digital and RF mixed signal work.
  It honestly might have been easier without that experience because KiCad is open source and their S-expr file format is easy to use. I'm stuck with Altium since that's what I learned on and am used to.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies