Descriptions:
Boris Starkov, an engineer at ElevenLabs, presents a conference talk at the AI Engineer Summit demonstrating how he used Claude Code to reverse engineer the undocumented binary protocol of a legacy Viking VOIP phone — a piece of hardware that had stumped three senior software engineers and ChatGPT for an entire year. The goal was to connect the retro phone to an ElevenLabs conversational AI agent running Michael Caine’s voice, routed through Twilio, as an interactive demo for summit attendees.
The technical narrative is detailed and reproducible. Claude Code began by running nmap to discover active ports, identified the correct communication interface, then brute-forced all two-letter command combinations to find the 80 valid commands the phone recognized. When that approach hit a dead end — matching where the original team had previously given up — Claude Code proposed setting up a Windows virtual machine to run the phone’s native XP-era software, then built a TCP proxy on the Mac host to intercept and log traffic between the VM and the phone. This man-in-the-middle setup exposed a “TS” command with an unknown binary payload and a one-byte checksum, which Claude Code reverse engineered through closed-loop iteration, confirming the algorithm by testing additional values.
Starkov frames the result as evidence that Claude Code is useful not just for greenfield application development but for low-level hardware exploration — tasks that previously required rare specialist knowledge or extensive manual trial and error. The slides themselves were generated by Claude Code from a transcript of the reverse engineering conversation, adding a meta layer to the demonstration.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published May 29, 2026
🏷️ Format: Showcase
