As a point of order Code Minification != Code Obfuscation.
Minification does tend to obfuscate as as side effect, but it is not the goal, so reversing minification becomes much easier. Obfuscation on the other hand can minify code, but crucially that isn't the place it starts from. As the goal is different between minificaiton and obfuscation reversing them takes different efforts and I'd much rather attempt to reverse minification than I would obfuscation.
I'd also readily believe there are hundreds/thousands of examples online of reverse code minification (or here is code X, here is code X _after_ minifcation) that LLMs have ingested in their training data.
Yeah, having run some state of the art obfuscated code through ChatGPT, it still fails miserably. Even what was state of the art 20 years ago it can't make heads or tails of.
Minification does tend to obfuscate as as side effect, but it is not the goal, so reversing minification becomes much easier. Obfuscation on the other hand can minify code, but crucially that isn't the place it starts from. As the goal is different between minificaiton and obfuscation reversing them takes different efforts and I'd much rather attempt to reverse minification than I would obfuscation.
I'd also readily believe there are hundreds/thousands of examples online of reverse code minification (or here is code X, here is code X _after_ minifcation) that LLMs have ingested in their training data.