{"id":1236172,"date":"2025-03-01T23:34:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-02T04:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1236172"},"modified":"2025-03-01T23:34:00","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T04:34:00","slug":"27-year-old-exe-became-python-in-minutes-is-ai-assisted-reverse-engineering-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1236172","title":{"rendered":"27-Year-Old EXE Became Python In Minutes.  Is AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering Next?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) shared an interesting blog post. They&#8217;d spotted a Reddit post &#8220;detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:<br \/>\n&#8220;Can you tell me how to get this file running? It&#8217;d be nice to convert it to Python.&#8221;&gt;<br \/>\nClaude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB &#8216;tokens&#8217; (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C\/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame. According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes&#8230;<br \/>\nTorrone speculates on what this might mean. &#8220;Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code&#8230; Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>And maybe Archive.org could even add an LLM &#8220;to do this on the fly!&#8221;<\/p>\n<div class=\"share_submission\" style=\"position:relative;\">\n<a class=\"slashpop\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/home?status=27-Year-Old+EXE+Became+Python+In+Minutes.++Is+AI-Assisted+Reverse+Engineering+Next%3F%3A+https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F25%2F03%2F01%2F2211210%2F%3Futm_source%3Dtwitter%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/twitter_icon_large-12.png\"><\/a><br \/>\n<a class=\"slashpop\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F25%2F03%2F01%2F2211210%2F27-year-old-exe-became-python-in-minutes-is-ai-assisted-reverse-engineering-next%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/facebook_icon_large-12.png\"><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/developers.slashdot.org\/story\/25\/03\/01\/2211210\/27-year-old-exe-became-python-in-minutes-is-ai-assisted-reverse-engineering-next?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&amp;utm_medium=feed\">Read more of this story<\/a> at Slashdot.<\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https:\/\/slashdot.org\/slashdot-it.pl?op=discuss&amp;id=23624527&amp;smallembed=1\" style=\"height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) shared an interesting blog post. They&#8217;d spotted a Reddit post &#8220;detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1236172\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,44,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1236172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slashdot","category-technology","category-unfiltered-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1236172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1236172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1236172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1236172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}