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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

So, you don't know if it has produced anything valuable yet?

It's the same story with these people running 12 parallel agents that automatically implement issues managed in Linear by an AI product team that has conducted automated market and user research.

Instead of making things, people are making things that appear busy making things. And as you point out, "but to what end?" is a really important question, often unanswered.

"It's the future, you're going to be left behind", is a common cry. The trouble is, I'm not sure I've seen anything compelling come back from that direction yet, so I'm not sure I've really been left behind at all. I'm quite happy standing where I am.

And the moment I do see something compelling come from that direction, I'll be sure to catch up, using the energy I haven't spent beating down the brush. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye on the other directions too.

> Instead of making things, people are making things that appear busy making things.

Sounds like a regular office job.

Yeah I'm not sure I understand what the goal here is. Ship of Harkinian is a rewrite not just a decompilation. As a human reverse engineer I've gotten a lot of false positives.This seems like one of those areas where hallucinations could be really insidious and hard to identify, especially for a non-expert. I've found MCP to be helpful with a lot of drudgery, but I think you would have to review the llm output, do extensive debugging/dynamic analysis, triage all potential false positives, before attempting to embark on a rewrite based on decompiled assembly... I think OoT took a team of experts collectively thousands of person-hours to fully document, it seems a bit too hopeful to want that and a rewrite just from being pushy to an agent...

Step 1: Decompile into C that can be recompiled into a working ROM. In theory, it could be compiled into the same ROM that we started with. Consistent ROM hash is the main success criteria for the OoT decompilation project. Have it grind until it succeeds.

Step 2: Integrate libultraship. Launching the game natively is the next criteria. Then ideally we could do differential testing on a frame by frame basis comparing emulated vs native.

Step 3: Semantic documentation of source. If it gets this far, I will be very impressed.

This is absolutely an experiment. It's a hard problem with low stakes. There a lot to learn from it.

Not yet. But what's the actual goal here? It's not to have a native Wave Race 64. It's to improve my intuition around what sort of tasks can be worked on 24/7 without supervision.

I have a hypothesis that I can verify the result against the original ROM. With that as the goal, I believe the agent can continue to grind on the problem until it passes that verification. I've seen it in that of other areas, but this is something larger and more tedious and I wanted to see how far it could go.

That sound like being a manager IRL.

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