$9000?

At $45 per hour ... call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything ... thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.

You'd almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation and get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn highly skilled low level expert working on this.

So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.

And I'm sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.

Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.

Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.

These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.

Its also possible to run these things locally... its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn't funding some corpo datacenter.

99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.

LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don't know what you're doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage. Also like other human tools, you cannot uninvent them.

This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge... is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.

I'm not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.