Simon Willison’s Weblog

Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography (via) Go cryptography author Filippo Valsorda reports on some very positive results applying Claude Code to the challenge of implementing novel cryptography algorithms. After Claude was able to resolve a "fairly complex low-level bug" in fresh code he tried it against two other examples and got positive results both time.

Filippo isn't directly using Claude's solutions to the bugs, but is finding it useful for tracking down the cause and saving him a solid amount of debugging work:

Three out of three one-shot debugging hits with no help is extremely impressive. Importantly, there is no need to trust the LLM or review its output when its job is just saving me an hour or two by telling me where the bug is, for me to reason about it and fix it.

Using coding agents in this way may represent a useful entrypoint for LLM-skeptics who wouldn't dream of letting an autocomplete-machine writing code on their behalf.