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Comment by squibonpig | Hacker News Reader

Had a similar experience getting a niche app running under wine. The bot had to bring in a different open source renderer, patch dlls, adapt a mapping tool from a different chip architecture to partly map and modify the binary, crazy stuff. Alternatives exist but are expensive, this got it working in an hour when doing it myself would probably be 2 weeks.

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Last week I had Claude add support for aac audio to davinci resolve on Linux, just by patching the binary. It did almost exclusively with gdb and objdump, patching about 5 functions over an hour or two.

I only got it to the proof of concept stage. The patch adds aac but breaks flac support in the process. And it only works for aac in mp4 container files. But I’m sure with a bit of time we could make a patch which works everywhere and is additive only.

I say ‘we’ - I barely helped. Almost all the work was done by Claude.

Here’s Claude’s report, if anyone wants to build on this work:

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/87d38c2e-9ecb-4066-90cf-e0b2...

Are you planning to develop this in the open somewhere. I would be more than interested to have that davinci capability as well

Got everything working and published here:

https://github.com/josephg/resolve-aacfix/releases

Not sure yet. Maybe! I put those notes online so someone else could continue Claude’s work. Or get another agent to plug away at it.

"I only got it to proof of concept.... I'm sure with time"

this is AI psychosis. LLMs by design product plausible output -- it ALWAYS seems like you just need a little more time. That's why the junkies are up all night playing with these things, and yet the next industrial revolution has NOT arrived. if this is the singularity where is my clothes folding bot, my cold fusion, and my cure for all cancers?

Please do not post about things the bot almost did. Nobody cares. When you COMPLETE something with the bot you can post. The rest is delusions.

The proof of concept works. You can use aac audio in resolve on Linux. It hasn’t been polished or productised, but it’s demonstrably working. If I got to this point on my own, I’d be very satisfied that I could finish the job.

That would be a justifiable inference in that case. But you didn't get to this point on your own. You haven't learned the knowledge you would have learned getting to this point on your own. Claude didn't either; generally speaking, it doesn't learn. So it may be misleading to reason by analogy to the counterfactual where you had gotten to this point on your own. Claude may or may not be able to finish the job. You won't know until you try.

> Claude may or may not be able to finish the job. You won't know until you try.

Yes, it’s weak evidence. Not proof. That is why I was quite explicit about what it has and hasn’t accomplished.

In my time with it, Claude seems fine at finishing up projects. And I’ve done enough reverse engineering to have a reasonably firm understanding of the outstanding work. I predict that Claude will have no problem finishing this up with some more guidance and tokens. You can of course have your own opinion, but I think it’s a bit much to claim I’m suffering from ai psychosis for having this expectation of its capabilities.

Not knowing you, I would not claim that you are suffering from AI psychosis. You seem to imply that I have made such a claim, but I have not.

Most big tech use LLMs to write most if not all of their code in current year. I have many negative things to say about it but if you think LLMs with a good harness can’t make anything that works you’re plain wrong. We’re shipping AI authored code to prod every day and it does the thing. Or maybe the psychosis goes so deep I’m just imagining all this and I’m actually unemployed

This isn’t “AI psychosis”. Stop this. Stop corrupting the definition of “psychosis” by pretending that “AI psychosis” can just be used as a descriptor for anyone that thinks that an LLM can do a thing that you don’t think it can. Any use of the term “AI psychosis” in all but the strictest sense is a huge red flag that someone’s objection is based on philosophical or political grounds, and your objection is a textbook example of that.

This is an extremely limited mindset. Reminds me of idiots linking to “ask smart questions” which does more to stifle conversation and education than anything else.

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