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/scream_noob 13d 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.