Blackbox reverse engineering: Rebuilding without source code
summary
Rebuilds a decades‑old retail system’s core functionality in one week using only static UI files, DB schema, historical recordings and native DLLs; combines AI-driven Playwright exploration (via a custom MCP server) with CDC/database triggers to capture DB effects, decompiles COM DLLs and runs a multipass traversal to turn about 40 submit‑path functions (from ~4,000 total) into pseudo‑code, maps middleware to stored procedures, validates against power‑user workflows, and delivers a confident functional spec plus working modern code and test harness.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Legacy modernization challenge
- 3:54AI-driven legacy interfaces
- 15:42Change data capture for AI
- 21:18Analyzing legacy DLLs
- 27:44Tree-based assembly translation
- 31:56Forward engineering specs
- 36:11AI-generated UI design
- 39:01Validating rebuilt specs
- 40:24Accelerating modernization
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