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The act of reducing the length of variable names by replacing something descriptive (like "timeFactor") with something much shorter ("i") may be mechanical and simple, but it is destructive and reversing that is not relatively easy; in fact, its impossible to do without a fairly sophisticated understanding of what the code does. That's what the LLM did for this; which isn't exactly surprising, but it is cool; being so immediately dismissive isn't cool.



I never meant to be dismissive, in fact my current job is to build a runtime for ML accelerator! I rather wanted to show that unminification is much easier than unobfuscation, and that the SOTA model is yet to do the latter.

Also, it should be noted that the name reconstruction is not a new problem and was already partly solved multiple times before the LLM era. LLM is great in that it can do this without massive retraining, but the reconstruction depends much on the local context (which was how earlier solutions approached the problem), so it doesn't really show its reasoning capability.




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