Ben Overmyer had a problem. A folder full of .wpost files sat on his drive for over a decade, remnants of his blogging days using Windows Live Writer. The blog platforms were gone. The software was dead. The files were locked in a proprietary format nobody could read without the original application.
So he asked Cursor, an AI coding assistant, to write a Python script that could convert those files into Markdown. It worked on the first try. When Overmyer realized the files contained embedded images too, he had Cursor extract those as well. Posts like "SWTOR First Impressions: The Sith Sorcerer" and "The First Habit: Using Cash Only" are back online after years of being completely inaccessible.
The reason Cursor handled this so well? A Hacker News commenter pointed out that Open Live Writer, the open-source fork maintained by the .NET Foundation, has its full source code on GitHub. Cursor almost certainly trained on it. That's how it parsed a proprietary Microsoft format without any official documentation. The AI had already read the code that built the format in the first place.
Overmyer released the tool as "wlw-extractor" on Codeberg under a CC BY-SA license. Millions of orphaned files sit in dead formats across the internet, unreachable because the software that made them no longer exists. AI coding agents that absorbed those codebases can now bridge the gap. Not through reverse engineering, but through having already read the blueprints.