The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude

Summary

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with ‘one-shot’ decompilation, leveraging Claude’s headless mode in a continuous loop. The results have been surprisingly positive. In the three weeks since adopting this workflow, I’ve made more progress on Snowboard Kids 2 than in the preceding three months.‘One-shot’ in this context means that Claude follows the prompt and exits. You hand it a function; it tries to match it, and you move on. The lack of a human-piloted feedback loop allows for significantly more throughput. I’ve left Claude for 8+ hours unattended and it will happily process functions trying to find matches. It does come with some risk, however. We’ve all seen LLMs go off the rails. Without a human present to intervene, you may return hours later to find your Claude quota exhausted, with little progress to show for it. But with the right scaffolding, the risk becomes manageable.The purpose of this post is to document the workflow I’ve arrived at, along with a few lessons that might apply to your own projects.The WorkflowAs a user, I just run:The script (originally called ‘vacuum’ for its intended purpose of hoovering up simple functions) handles everything from there. It will churn through matchable functions until none remain, either because each has been matched or has been marked as too difficult.Under the hood, the system has four components:The scorer picks the next function to attempt, prioritising those most likely to match;Claude performs the actual decompilation using the provided tools;Tools give Claude what it needs to decompile the function;The driver manages the lifecycle: invoking Claude, handling failures, logging progress.The following sections cover each in detail.The ScorerThe purpose of the scorer is to find the next easiest function for Claude to decompile. Claude is less capable than a human at this task so it would be most efficient to spend our time and energy on areas where we’re likely to make meaningful progress. This also helps lay the ...