reverse engineering
Recover a behavioral specification from an existing system.
Use this when You need compatibility with an existing product or undocumented module.
without the term
“We need our new version to work exactly like the old tool, but nobody documented how the old one behaves. Can you poke at it and figure out what it does before rebuilding it?”
with the term · How do you ask a model for reverse engineering?
Reverse-engineer this workflow into input/output examples. Verify them against the existing implementation before building its replacement.
What is reverse engineering?
You observe how the existing system responds to inputs and edge cases, then write those observations down as examples before building anything that must behave the same way.
Why does reverse engineering matter when vibe coding?
A visual imitation can miss the behavior callers depend on.
How do you do reverse engineering?
Record representative interactions and turn the observations into executable examples.
What goes wrong with reverse engineering?
Assuming an unobserved edge case behaves like the happy path.