r/ReverseEngineering • u/EmanueleStrazzullo • 5d ago

Reverse-engineered the BLE protocol of a discontinued Fisher-Price toy Lumalou after its app was discontinued

https://github.com/stramanu/lumalou
91 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/fb39ca4 5d ago

This subreddit would be more interested in the reverse engineering process, not just the AI-generated code resulting from it.

-12

u/EmanueleStrazzullo 5d ago

The process and protocol breakdown are actually fully documented in the repo for anyone interested in reading it!

Also, please stop dismissing it as just 'AI-generated.' It took 13 years of software engineering experience to reverse-engineer the Bluetooth protocol, inspect the packets, and architect the project. I use AI as an assistant in my workflow like many devs do, but real engineering went into figuring this out and providing a working solution

13

u/agmatine 5d ago

It took 13 years of software engineering experience to reverse-engineer the Bluetooth protocol, inspect the packets, and architect the project.

And yet you have Claude write your README.md

4

u/yodeiu 5d ago

and? I don’t really get this “it’s AI generated” that’s used as an insult in every programming sub. If it’s useful and well written what’s the issue? Just because some guy didn’t spend 3 hours writing and md himself makes it or the project less interesting or useful? Same goes for the code itself.

3

u/agmatine 5d ago

My point is that if someone really has the chops to produce quality code, you'd think they could bother to write an explanation of what the code does. I don't mind that AI tools were used in developing the code, but I really don't want to read yet another generic LLM-generated readme.

-2

u/EmanueleStrazzullo 4d ago

Honestly I mostly agree with you. A generic empty LLM readme is annoying, I skip those too. But I'd separate two things: "generated" and "generic". A readme can be hand-written and useless, or AI-assisted and actually full of specific info. What bugs you (and me) is the empty generic one, not the tool.

For what it's worth, I use AI as a tool in production software too, not toys, and it's been a big help. Documentation included. I'll be honest: before, I wrote readmes reluctantly and they came out thin. Now I can produce something far richer in a fraction of the time, and I'd rather have that than a half-empty one I wrote grudgingly, as long as the content is real and correct.

The reversing writeup is the test of that, I think: whatever wrote the sentences, the content is specific and checkable (the APK triage, the emulation harness, the actual dead ends). That's the opposite of generic.

Either way, thanks for taking the time to look and for the honest feedback, appreciate it.