Reddit post detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python.
It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:
“Can you tell me how to get this file running? It’d be nice to convert it to Python.”
Claude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB ‘tokens’ (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame.
According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes – they link to the LLM chat log for proof.
Totally makes sense that this would work, this seems like the first public/viral example of uploading an EXE like this though – we never even thought of doing such a thing!
Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code (is Delphi also semi-compiled?). Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too…
Archive.org could add a LLM to do this on the fly… interesting times! – Link.
Robin Edgar
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