10 years is far too pessimistic for this being a routine task, I think 2 years max. As you mentioned, you can already do this today by just giving GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8 an IDA/Ghidra tooling (a CLI or MCP, I have a custom CLI for it). You can start with the LLM going from the string anchors and renaming functions/globals, then when you have enough functions, the LLM can start working on typing - IDA has a very powerful typing API for HexRays-decompiled code, you can even type locals and it all persists in a DB.
My custom IDA CLI is just a simple thing on top of IDA Python's integration + ida-domain + some higher-level helpers, and works as a daemon with workers, so a stale/bad request doesn't corrupt an IDA DB (an issue I had when I was using idasql).
A bit offtopic, but: do you have any links to your efforts? I'm curious to see what other people do in this area.
Not yet, unfortunately, but I might in the future. To be honest, it's nothing unique. I got inspired by https://github.com/allthingsida/idasql which I initially used, but it had a lot of bugs, a big codebase size, and IDA's C++ API is really easy to misuse and corrupt a DB, so I had GPT 5.4/5.5 make a new one for itself based on IDA's Python SDK, which is official and doesn't need weird SQL hacks.
Then recently I found https://github.com/bkerler/ida_rpc which seems to be ~60% the same thing as the one I have, the only big difference is that I do not give any special commands to LLMs, they just have to write Python in scripts/inline heredocs to interact with IDA. This lets them do a lot more interesting things since they get a full programming language.
This is an example of how LLMs work with idagent (`ida` is implicitly imported, ida.types, ida.comments is helper's own wrappers): https://paste.debian.net/hidden/cf46a122
More interesting example that was used to let the LLM/me track the rename progress for the initial function renames + gaps (code-looking like bytes that weren't inside of functions, IDA's autoanalysis missed some real functions). Although the game turned out to be small enough with only ~1500 real game functions that needed renames, which was done in ~10 hours of agent time total I think (I didn't parallelize with multiple agents).
https://paste.debian.net/hidden/bf458b3a
To be honest, you can probably have an agent vibecode a similar MVP tool to the one I have in about an hour-two :)
My custom IDA CLI is just a simple thing on top of IDA Python's integration + ida-domain + some higher-level helpers, and works as a daemon with workers, so a stale/bad request doesn't corrupt an IDA DB (an issue I had when I was using idasql).
A bit offtopic, but: do you have any links to your efforts? I'm curious to see what other people do in this area.