We've been using LLMs for security research (finding vulnerabilities in ML frameworks) and the pattern is similar - it's surprisingly good at the systematic parts (pattern recognition, code flow analysis) when you give it specific constraints and clear success criteria.

The interesting part: the model consistently underestimates its own speed. We built a complete bug bounty submission pipeline - target research, vulnerability scanning, POC development - in hours when it estimated days. The '10 attempts' heuristic resonates - there's definitely a point where iteration stops being productive.

For decompilation specifically, the 1M context window helps enormously. We can feed entire codebases and ask 'trace this user input to potential sinks' which would be tedious manually. Not perfect, but genuinely useful when combined with human validation.

The key seems to be: narrow scope + clear validation criteria + iterative refinement. Same as this decompilation work.