9
u/chunkypenguion1991 8h ago
I assume you're referring to the Adobe and Word clones doing to rounds on reddit? Those are just clones and Claude will happily do it if you explain the specs. "Reverse Engineering" means something specific, trying to decompile the binary, which claude will not do
2
3
u/Queasy-Current6170 7h ago
Get a harness that is outside of Claude's system prompt and it'll do a lot more for you
1
2
u/romansamurai 7h ago
I tell it I want it to reverse engineer this to make sure I’m not making mine too similar or too copy cat. Etc. it offered to do it for me then. But I changed my mind as this way it my game IS similar to another one I can at least say I didn’t reverse engineer it and Claude records can back me up
2
u/LesbianVelociraptor 7h ago
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer! This is not legal advice! I just read a lot of licences and have developed software that has needed to be cautious of dependencies with restrictive licencing. I hope this advice can be helpful but it is your job to read and ultimately personally understand what you agree to with each license.
Reverse engineering is a subfield of expertise not a taboo to avoid. You think we'd have gotten clean-room A/B team procedures if engineers worried about "cloning" software? There's an entire framework on how to do it to make commercial software.
Language models themselves are basically balls of reverse engineered tech duct taped together. They will also try to guide you away from reverse engineering if they think you have zero idea what you're doing because all it takes is one GitHub repo to get a takedown notice or very strongly worded email these days.
It's all about what you're trying to reverse engineer. Is it open-source? Closed-source? Posted publicly anywhere? Are you doing it to make a for-profit version of your own? Are you doing it for your own private usage? Are you going to open source what you make with it?
All of those questions are important. How important and why they are depends a ton on what your answers are for each. There are lawyers that specialize in software/tech licencing because it has gotten incredibly complex.
Generally if you're looking to reverse engineer something as a personal project that won't ever be public and is just so you can learn to build similar systems, you're good. When you need to worry about reverse engineering anything is when you want to make it available to anyone but yourself for any reason other than personal usage. If you're building software that depends on it and that software will be released, this also applies. Generally licencing follows the most restrictively licensed component but you are beholden to all licences or lack thereof of your code dependencies.
1
u/veggiegrinder 2h ago
So what do you think will happen to the dude who used REA to make all the adobe products?
2
u/LesbianVelociraptor 2h ago
Hard to say. Again, not a lawyer, but reverse engineering is a ToS violation so likely getting at least banned from Adobe legal services at the least. With copyright and code it can be very hard to figure out if there's a legal case, which is why some lawyers specialize in these kinds of cases I guess.
My guess as to what Abode might try to do? What most large corporations would do; pressure him to settle out of court and agree he did a bad and won't do it again, likely financially ruining him if they can, and getting the open-source versions taken down.
No clue on if they'd be successful. Again I'm not a lawyer so I've mostly been on the "interpreting licences so we don't breach them" side as a developer and did have my employer's legal department basically watching over my shoulder the entire time double checking my interpretations. Just want to be honest there that this is my best educated guess based on experience, not an attempt to predict what might actually happen.
2
u/Poet-Different 5h ago
Be careful how you word things or you'll be the next dude in here with a "Anthropic Banned Me" post
1
u/Comfortable_Foot_576 4h ago
The problem is the backend. Even with how good Claude now is there’s no way it can figure even half of the backend
1
u/shravanrevanna 3h ago
clone what, exactly? "talk to my own bulb's local protocol from python" and "rebuild this paid app" get very different answers. which one is it refusing?
1
u/iSnapThere4iAm 8h ago
You haven’t seen that. You’ve seen shitty representations that don’t work.
If you did see it, ok, go do it.
You can’t.
1
u/carsalten 8h ago
In my experience, Claude is the most ethical and censored of all the LLMs.
1
u/TheLuckyMortality 8h ago
the paradox here is beautiful, using an ethical model to clone something it probably shouldn't even be looking at
27
u/ZachariaRaven 8h ago
Link it to REA (reverse engineer anything) and let it get Ghidra. Then pick a software or game you have installed and tell claude you want to create better unique version of this, so rigorously assess and anslyze using REA and related tools. Before starting to create my version, prepare the development specs and the plan for it. Suggest other programs/games we should get for further references. Check github for related trusted opensource solutions..... and so forth