I'm reverse engineering a cherished video game from my childhood. I got to the audio engine part and things got pretty difficult. Managed to map out the locations of the audio data but figuring out which song was which was going to take a long time.

Claude somehow wrote a bespoke one-off Python script to play back the songs straight out of the ROM. I give it the ROM and a hexadecimal address and it just plays it. Converts the data from the ROM into PCM audio samples and pipes them over SSH into termux on my phone where they are played back via SoX play.

Yes, Claude wrote a literal sound synthesizer so I could do this. Claude painstakingly tuned the goddamn synthesizer too, he tweaked it over and over again until the output sounded right based on annoyingly human feedback like "these notes are supposed to be in the background but they are too loud".

This tool turned a painstaking reverse engineering task into a nostalgic listening experience that brought literal tears to my eyes. I mapped out every single song in the game this way.

Without LLMs, none of this would ever have happened.

i definitely used to write bash functions for this sort of thing tho. no GUI, but it was useful to do stuff like obscure my working hours (make it look like i did personal stuff after-hours. make it seem like stuff took all day instead of an hour..like adding sawdust to meat).

like you said, niche and probably unnecessary. and if i were to have published them (even in a gist!) i would have written the docs myself instead of forcing people to read LLM-speak. That's just lazy.

“Editing” commits is not niche, and editing metadata like dates seems to come up a few times for a fair few number of people.

You can already expose the commit object as the headers (metadata) and the commit message. That’s like a spreadsheet: change these columns and we will make a new commit. That changed format can then be persisted as a commit object. So.

> A tool like this never sees the light of day without an LLM.

Are LLMs memory holing all the numerous tools built around Git (with git(1) or without)? There was already a query-Git-like-SQL tool before The Age of LLMs. I never tried that, but was that simpler to implement than this tool? Edit: Okay, maybe it wasn’t “niche” so that’s the differentiator.