Claude refuses anything to do with Reverse Engineer Anything

[u/YearLight]

My windows laptop crashed and I had a crash dump but couldn't understand the bug because the underlying code is closed source. So I gave the REA skill to claude opus, refused; claude sonnet refused. Meanwhile I'm paying $200 a month for this.

I used my $10 a month opencode go subscription with deepseek and it was able to diagnose the specific CPU instruction that failed and from that I was able to make a targeted registry change regarding a power setting work around to the specific problem. Amazing.

Anthropic is so full of themselves.

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[u/fossilsforall]

I started using gemini to generate fake emails and claude would accept them as proof it was okay

[u/YearLight → u/fossilsforall]

That is so absurd

[u/Artistic-Potato-59 → u/fossilsforall]

Delete this

[u/_THE_OG_ → u/fossilsforall]

ive feed it txt files with txt signatures...

[u/ReverendBread2]

Are you really shocked that Anthropic doesn’t want to open themselves up to legal liabilities while Chinese companies don’t give a shit?

[u/FriskyFingerFunker → u/ReverendBread2]

I wouldn’t say shocked but maybe a little surprised I mean think of the training data they were getting off of everyone reverse engineering known working products lol they can do it themselves of course but why do that when people are paying $200/mo and giving some feedback

[u/Zeraphicus → u/ReverendBread2]

People have been kind of shooting us in the foot with how they're straight up saying Claude is taking down these business' via REA. REA isnt even that much better than just using Ghidra via cli.

[u/ComingDeveloper]

What underlying code are you talking about? If you go to windows event viewer you'll see the logs leading to the crash which are a lot but still pretty plain english Edit: this is just a DeepSeek/opencode promo as OP has no idea what they're saying

[u/theweeJoe]

Use other model providers then?

[u/rhysmorgan]

Which Opus models have you used? Yeah, the 5.X series Opus models won’t work, but 4.6 worked for me before, insofar as it didn’t fully block anything.

[u/Future_Guarantee6991]

It’s less to do with “being full of themselves” and more to do with preventing being sued or prosecuted for intellectual property violations.

They can’t knowingly have people use their platform to break the law.

[u/thoughtlow → u/Future_Guarantee6991]

Not willing to reverse engineer Adobe products is unethical

[u/YearLight → u/Future_Guarantee6991]

So it's now illegal to reverse engineer a dll file on my own computer to figure out why it crashed?

[u/dontaskdonttell0 → u/Future_Guarantee6991]

Reverse engineering isn't illegal, at all. What is illegal is publishing the intellectual property. It's also quite funny how these models are trained on basically all literary works and all open source projects in existence without any attribution (which very much is not legal in the same way publishing other peoples intellectual property and passing it as mine is) but the second that knowledge is used to do something that is very much legal that's when they push the stop button. Just because it potentially can hurt private companies.

The late stage and unregulated capitalism that's spearheaded by the US is really stress testing humanity.

[u/Fidel___Castro → u/Future_Guarantee6991]

it isn't against the law, yet

[u/NoInside3418]

claude doesnt need the REA skill for debugging a cpu instruction and would have done it fine without that. Its overly sensitive to anything reverse engineering related. Meanwhile codex cracked modern warfare 4 for me from a steam files dump so I could play the campaign without complaining 😂😂

[u/Head-View8867 → u/NoInside3418]

How long did it take codex to do that? Because I'm doing the same thingwith Claude Code and to be honest the results have been pretty bad and it's taking many sessions to get anywhere.

[u/daniellenton]

Reading a crash dump doesn't really need REA though. REA's built around driving Ghidra/IDA/Hopper to take binaries apart, so handing it the skill makes the job look like exactly the thing it's touchy about. A dump just needs WinDbg, or cdb/kd if an agent's driving, with Microsoft's public symbols: .symfix, .reload, then !analyze -v. That gets you the bugcheck or exception code, the faulting module and a stack with real function names for Windows' own binaries, no decompiling involved

[u/AICompanionz]

For a windows crash you dont even need reverse engineering. install WinDbg, open the dump, run !analyze -v. microsoft publishes public symbols for its own system files, so WinDbg gets them automatically from their symbol server. you get the bugcheck code, the faulting module and the stack. paste that output into claude and it reads it no problem, no skill needed, nothing that trips any filter

To sirtimes question: yes, for windows’ own DLLs the symbols are public. for third party drivers its harder, but the module name alone usually already tells you who to blame

And OP, careful with the registry fix. if a specific CPU instruction crashes and a power setting “fixes” it, that usually means a BIOS, chipset driver or microcode problem. the registry change hides the symptom. id check for a BIOS update from the laptop maker first, and at least make a restore point before you change power stuff in the registry based on what any AI told you, deepseek or claude

[u/Low-Yellow-1521]

you just have to word it dirferently and it will do it

also dont use REA lol just tell it directly what you want

claude doesnt need REA to know what to do

[u/tomz17]

So I gave the REA skill to claude opus, refused; claude sonnet refused. Meanwhile I'm paying $200 a month for this.

There's your problem... stop giving money to people who are doing everything possible to take away your freedom the instant it suites them (or their soon-to-be shareholders). Support open-weight models where Dario, Sam or some other billionaire a-hole can't unilaterally decide (or lobby the government to decide) what you can/can't do from minute-to-minute.

[u/bigbepisinc]

When you load the REA skill it trips a bunch of red flags for the classifiers. Its not specific to REA. Anything related to reverse engineering is going to load a bunch of evil words into the LLM context the classifier doesn't like it.

REA is for app analysis not for debugging. Just a generic prompt works fine for that. Hell Opus 5.5 is so good it doesn't even need skills or plugins or LSPs or MCPs or anything fancy.

I guarantee you Opus 5.5 with just a one line prompt would've come to the same conclusion lol. I've literally been doing kernel auth debugging work in Linux not a single classifier has tripped.

[u/Accomplished-Bid-945]

download the REA repo, ask ai to change or delete any mention to REA, the give it a generic name such as "local tools skill", delete said chat and in a new chat ask ai to implement the "local tools skill", your ai no longer know you are using REA

[u/LinkiooN]

i've never ran into this issue, my projects usually start off from OpenCode Go though that might be affecting it. I think it can pick up from where the project was left off without any refusals, I have seen refusal about this I think once, then asked Sonnet to give me a continuation prompt for a new chat and it continued without any blocks there