Detecting AI obfuscated porting [LWN.net]

Detecting AI obfuscated porting

Posted Jun 2, 2026 9:47 UTC (Tue) by jorgegv (subscriber, #60484)
In reply to: Detecting AI obfuscated porting by khim
Parent article: Ombredanne: An AI agent ported our codebase from Python to Rust

> design is way beyond their capabilities and we have no idea if they would ever be able to do that. They probably would, eventually, but not as fast as their proponents like to preach.

I have to disagree here. LLMs are definitely already designing architectures. Perhaps not complicated ones, not humongous projects, but they are definitely there. I'm talking on experience here, not feelings.

I'm using them currently for work and personal projects, and Claude was able to design from scratch (and is currently implementing) a retro computing emulator. My emulator is fully working at this point, and I'm fixing bugs.

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Detecting AI obfuscated porting

Posted Jun 2, 2026 11:08 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

> I have to disagree here. LLMs are definitely already designing architectures. Perhaps not complicated ones, not humongous projects, but they are definitely there.

They are very nice at stealing existing code and translating it to work in new place.

But the limitation is still the same: 200-300 lines code should give you something working and testable. That's not “designing an architecture”, that's “finding a place where someone's else architecture may fit”.

And yes, it's really impressive, they like to graft massive amount of code to repeat the same architecture that they found somewhere again and again.

But that's an attempt to build a skyscraper by piling twigs into a large pile. You may build a hut that way or maybe evem, evetually something similar to the ant's nest… but that's not an architecture, that's still pile of pieces not connected in any sensible order.

> I'm using them currently for work and personal projects, and Claude was able to design from scratch (and is currently implementing) a retro computing emulator. My emulator is fully working at this point, and I'm fixing bugs.

So Claude have duplicated something that was done thousands of times and was able to amalgamate that into something kinda-sorta-working… what's the big deal? It's very easy to see when it does that: try to ask it to add something that needs a component that is not there yet, and it would start with calling it, then trying to compile — and only then finding out it needs to be writtem. But try to do something differently from how other projects do thing, on average — and you'll discover that it would ignore your requests and would return “design” back to the average between other projects of similar nature.

Detecting AI obfuscated porting

Posted Jun 2, 2026 22:29 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I disagree. I'm running experiments with a local model, and it can design an LTFS FUSE filesystem from scratch given the specs and detailed requirements. It could even design a decent SCSI interface with a real tape drive!

It took it a bit of walking around in circles, but in the end it could one-shot it. And this is a _local_ model!

Detecting AI obfuscated porting

Posted Jun 7, 2026 4:47 UTC (Sun) by fwyzard (subscriber, #90840) [Link] (1 responses)

Curious, what model?

Detecting AI obfuscated porting

Posted Jun 7, 2026 23:01 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

The recent dense qwen 3.6, with subagents running several other models. There's also a "supervisor" agent that monitors the harness for looping detection.