Of course, it is not generalizable! In my experience though, most minifiers do only the following:
- Whitespace removal, which is trivially invertible.
- Comment removal, which we never expect to recover via unminification.
- Renaming to shorter names, which is tedious to track but still mechanical. And most minifiers have little understanding of underlying types anyway, so they are usually very conservative and rarely reuse the same mangled identifier for multiple uses. (Google Closure Compiler is a significant counterexample here, but it is also known to be much slower.)
- Constant folding and inlining, which is annoying but can be still tracked. Again, most minifiers are limited in their reasoning to do extensive constant folding and inlining.
- Language-specific transformations, like turning `a; b; c;` into `a, b, c;` and `if (a) b;` into `a && b;` whenever possible. They will be hard to understand if you don't know in advance, but there aren't too many of them anyway.
As a result, minified code still remains comparably human-readable with some note taking and perseverance. And since these transformations are mostly local, I would expect LLMs can pick them up by their own as well.
(But why? Because I do inspect such programs fairly regularly, for example for comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066262)
- Whitespace removal, which is trivially invertible.
- Comment removal, which we never expect to recover via unminification.
- Renaming to shorter names, which is tedious to track but still mechanical. And most minifiers have little understanding of underlying types anyway, so they are usually very conservative and rarely reuse the same mangled identifier for multiple uses. (Google Closure Compiler is a significant counterexample here, but it is also known to be much slower.)
- Constant folding and inlining, which is annoying but can be still tracked. Again, most minifiers are limited in their reasoning to do extensive constant folding and inlining.
- Language-specific transformations, like turning `a; b; c;` into `a, b, c;` and `if (a) b;` into `a && b;` whenever possible. They will be hard to understand if you don't know in advance, but there aren't too many of them anyway.
As a result, minified code still remains comparably human-readable with some note taking and perseverance. And since these transformations are mostly local, I would expect LLMs can pick them up by their own as well.
(But why? Because I do inspect such programs fairly regularly, for example for comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066262)