Using AI to reverse engineer hardware

I've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern.

I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.

In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.

The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.

And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.

The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.

The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.

I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.

The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.

If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.

Someone please do "smart" TVs. You have the chance to remove ads and botnets ("residential proxies") from millions of devices.

As an aside: I tried using claude to write GTK4 applications in december 2025/january 2026 and it was awful at it, barely even helpful. Then in September it's writing great gtk4 apps with barely any prompting.

Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole. I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it. Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.

> only to discover that in the time between me giving up and then trying again someone had committed code to SANE to support the scanner already…..it happens sometimes.

One of the best things you can do in these situations is to actually audit the code that was contributed against the code you have. If you have more than was contributed, you could potentially still make a contribution of what's missing, against the structure of the existing contribution.

Soon: "Hi Claude, can you translate iOS so it runs in a sandbox on Linux?"

Or: "Can you turn this tablet I got from AliExpress into an iPad?"

It's going to be interesting to watch the big companies struggle with this.

Software is in the same boat. Licenses and obfuscation never really protected anything - it was just too much work/effort to copy. Now it's one prompt..

How timely, I just now pointed Claude at my work laptops MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.

Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?

Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]

Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.

No more excuses.

[0] https://github.com/nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-watch-companion-pair-...