[mahaloz]

I agree with many other sentiments here that if it can replace decompilers, then surely it can replace compilers... which feels unlikely soon. So far, I've seen four end-to-end binary-to-code AI approaches, and none have had convincing results. Even those that crawled all of GitHub continue to have issues of making fake code, not understanding math, omitting portions of code, and (a personal irritant for me) being unable to map what address a line of decompilation came from.

However, I also acknowledge that AI can solve many pattern-based problems well. I think a considerable value can be extracted from AI by focusing in on micro decisions in the decompiler process, like variable types, as recent work has.

[jcranmer]

I'd feel a lot more comfortable in the prospects of AI if their big boosters weren't so gung-ho about it replacing absolutely everything. Compilers (and by extension decompilers) are one of the areas where we have the ability to have formal proofs of correctness [1]--and the fact that AI people seem to be willing to throw all of that away in favor of their maybe-correct-but-does-it-really-matter-if-it's-not tools is extremely distressing to me.

[1] And one of the big advances in compilers in the past decade or so is the fact that compilers are actually using these in practice!

[pjc50]

> I'd feel a lot more comfortable in the prospects of AI if their big boosters weren't so gung-ho about it replacing absolutely everything. Compilers (and by extension decompilers) are one of the areas where we have the ability to have formal proofs of correctness [1]--and the fact that AI people seem to be willing to throw all of that away in favor of their maybe-correct-but-does-it-really-matter-if-it's-not tools is extremely distressing to me.

God yes. These people are infuriating; it's as if they've abandoned the concept of provable correctness, or never understood it in the first place, and replaced it with "looks good enough to me on a few examples". Some sort of gambler's fallacy where if you get a right answer once it doesn't matter how many wrong answers you get.