Hacker News Reader

For low level work (kernels, drivers, C, assembly), things like ChatGPT and Cursor are a 0.1X multiplier. They suggest idiotic things both design-wise and implementation-wise. In this world, I’ll take my cat’s help over theirs. Maybe it’ll improve, but I won’t hold my breath.

View on HN

That's sort of ironic. One of the biggest value adds I've seen to my hobby work is that LLMs are REALLY good at understanding disassembly and can even do things like symbolically execute a few lines for me. I've used it to deobfuscate several malware protections and I can imagine it will get better.

However, I have never tried it on kernels, drivers, etc. Just the inverse of that :)

These algorithms are not capable of symbolic reasoning and abstract interpretation. The most obvious demonstration of this is that no algorithm on the market currently can solve sudoku puzzles even though they have spent billions of dollars "training" them on logic and reasoning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com