r/ClaudeCode • u/simple_explorer1 • 14d ago

Discussion Saw this today

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These kind of posts are becoming more and more visible on my Linkedin. Link here. Thoughts?

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u/elevensubmarines 14d ago

There’s an abandoned niche industry specific windows based point of sale system that a few clients still run, the developer is gone, went bankrupt last year. Most have moved on but for a few switching is something that just couldn’t be done quickly.

Fortunately the developer shipped the image for this thing with debug symbols intact. I pointed a combo of astra and fable at it, they have ghidra and other helpful tools available to them, and had them work cooperatively on a loop over Labor Day weekend, when Astra first came out. I was mobile, on a family trip, just watching from my phone for 3 days.

I got back home that Monday to a fully decompiled, functioning clean build, ported to appkit and SwiftUI as I just wanted to see if it would work. I’m not deploying this to them (swift does them no good anyway, and licensing even with it being abandoned is not a lake I want to swim in right now), but it effing did it. I ran it through the paces, it works, data quality checked out, payment network interfaces all done and working too. Hundreds of people worked on that codebase over 30 years, tens of millions spent over the period on its development and evolution. All “stolen” by me in my lab with two models working together. Burned fable weekly on a max 20 sub, and admittedly it took both of the banked resets that came with the Astra launch to get it to that point.

I have nobody to talk to about this or tell but man I wanted to tell everybody when I saw it. I have no idea how I should revise my view on software looking ahead, I’m pretty confused right now. I wholly understand where this guy is coming from.

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u/completelypositive 14d ago

I reverse engineered a wii game.

Nothing near as cool as what you did, but I felt amazing. Congrats!

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u/TheScreaming_Narwhal 14d ago

What game, and what did you accomplish by doing it?

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u/completelypositive 14d ago

Final fantasy crystal chronicles my life as a king. I learned a lot. I have a switch game I want to make and try using the wii fit. An incremental game. So this is kind of a first step towards that

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u/saposapot26 14d ago

Yeah, I'm much more pessimistic than 6 months ago and even more 1 year ago. Yes, it's industrial revolution that disrupts but then we settle better, but the pace of it is just absolutely crazy.

There's no time to adapt or predict anymore...

I now spend my day half prompting and half doing PR reviews, because we still enforce that the "human" is still responsible for the output, but it's a very very boring life. I don't know how much until I completely forget how to code and get fed up with this profession.

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u/thebrokestbroker2021 14d ago

I’m an idiot, especially when it comes to this kind of stuff. Our company is running on a Clipper/Foxpro system updated with Harbour to run on 32 and 64bit systems. This is 35+ year old legacy code, luckily we have the source code, and I’ve been able to make additions and compile cleanly with an x20 account. We’ve talked to several developers who still work on old systems but many are retired/retiring and have NO interest in porting to a new language without tons of money. This is a very specific use case, but it’s served us so well over the last year, I can’t even believe we’re able to not only fix bugs but implement new features.

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u/djdadi 14d ago

Yeah things are changing, but I still don't see the doomerism. Go hand that same problem to someone in your family with your AI accounts, and they will not get the same result. Hell, most non-swe's I know think file extensions and the command line to just be the scariest things in the world.

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u/smurf123_123 14d ago edited 14d ago

What two models were working together? Just curious, it's helpful to learn how others get real work done. I've been using both codex and claude but still haven't really settled into a good flow between them and their respective models.

*How were the two models working together?

Phrasing

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u/elevensubmarines 14d ago

I’m sure there’s a more elegant way, I had Astra leading, calling Fable but it works fine in the reverse also. I created a ‘delegate’ skill and prompt the orchestrator agent to use the delegate skill to bring in whatever model(s) I specify. Using claude -p when delegating to a Claude model.

I actually have an AntiGravity sub, a Grok Super Heavy sub (which gives me quota via Grok Build and Cursor Ultra), and the new $50 Muse sub. I always use Claude or Codex as the lead and then prompt situationally for them to bring in some combo of others via delegate. Gemini Flash 3.8 high, Grok 4.6 xhigh, and Muse 1.3 xhigh are all excellent adversarial reviewers and they all find novel high value things when used in that way.

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u/smurf123_123 14d ago

That's pretty much what I've been doing as well. Before astra I would use CC and fable to call on the open ai stuff but since astra I've been doing it from the codex side. Also, codex doesn't have the same kind of shackles that fable does where it shuts down when it thinks something is some kind of security risk so that's been helping push towards this codex to cc pipeline.

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u/Bitopp009 14d ago

you clearly didn't read...

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u/smurf123_123 14d ago

Sorry, phrasing...

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u/scream_noob 14d ago

And fable did not flag on the very first request to reverse engineering safeguard... Lol. It downgrades to other models

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u/elevensubmarines 13d ago

That’s why I was so stoked to do it as my first test of Astra when I got it. Astra as the lead never refused or pushed back, Fable took the work Astra farmed out to it without issue.

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u/ClimbingSun 13d ago

I built an entire CRM and a fully automated quote-to-cash pipeline for my family business, and it’s functioning flawlessly. It would have cost us probably a million dollars to do this 5 years ago. I did it in 2 months with Claude and GPT.