An independent research notebook on AI engineering, agents, models and the systems around them.https://julin.ai/atom/tags/ai/index.xmlJu Lin2026-10-22T00:00:00+13:00https://julin.ai/2026/10/22/ai-reverse-engineering/2026-10-22T00:00:00+13:002026-10-22T00:00:00+13:00<p>A developer <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104955">reported on Hacker News</a> decompiling three competitor products in 72 hours using Claude Opus 5.5—including the Strymon Big Sky, an award-winning hardware effects processor. One prompt. Three hours.</p> <p>The method: Claude wrote an emulator for the original firmware, then translated it to independent C++ with 100% native-level replication. Along the way, Claude discovered and incorporated a reverse-engineering project someone had uploaded to GitHub a week earlier.</p> <p>This raises an immediate question: What competitive moat remains for hardware and low-level software companies when reverse engineering costs nearly nothing?</p> <p>The answer probably involves speed to market, ecosystem lock-in, and trust. But the window for those advantages may be closing faster than anyone expected.</p>