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.