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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.
Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.
On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.
What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.
The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.
I'm going to echo one of the below comments and state that reverse engineering has gotten good, but that's a long way from perfect. The various photoshop and office clones out there do a great job of looking convincing, but the reverse engineering is only skin deep.
And none of this should be a surprise, as these tools have been developed over decades with hundreds if not thousands of people contributing. That you can run Astra or Opus for a weekend and get 80% of the way there is pretty incredible, and some skeptics using the fact that they aren't 100% to say AI is rubbish is an incredibly stupid argument.
The pareto principle still applies though, and I don't think (assuming AI just stopped advancing, which it won't) this would change software that much. Maybe 1-2 months of tinkering with your agents would get you basically feature complete for all the big stuff on a photoshop, but then the rest is going to be 10000 little things that have been added in over the decades and will take ages to discover and implement. 99% of these vibe projects are going to lose interest after the first week and go nowhere. Enterprises will continue to use the big SaaS programs, and you'll see some more niche stuff switch more to internal builds. (again, assuming AI didn't keep advancing. What will actually happen is in 6 months - 1year they will be pretty much perfect and software will cease to exist)
The big impact is likely going to be the cloud coming for even more software, especially in gaming. Reverse engineering is difficult, because you only have the software's surface to inspect. Decompiling a local application is a different ballgame and I think, even if direct game streaming remains a niche, a lot of games are going to shift some parts of their functions into the cloud, to tie games to internet access and prevent them from simply being copied straight away.
"Can the results convince experts," that is the real test, imho. So for math, can AI-assisted papers actually get published in journals by non-experts using the tools. Can non-experts make art or writing using AI that is likewise well-received.
This is why AI is so big right now: it's software and other analytical stuff, not art. This is literally worth trillions given the valuations of Anthropic + Open IA. Soon every company will be using AI, such as payroll.
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In a comment down the thread, I mentioned that (1) my business makes use of proprietary software; (2) the software company wanted to switch to one of those monthly subscription extortionate pricing schemes; (3) I used AI to build a stripped down version of the software with only the features I need; and (4) so far it's working fine.
So while I agree that it would be a challenge to get 100% of the way to a reverse engineered copy, a lot of the time 50% of the way is more than good enough.
Based on my experience, I would say that AI poses a big threat to these software companies that try to lock you into their system and then rent-seek.
Some of my coworkers made the unfortunate choice to use Apple laptops. They can't run any of our software tools on them. Every external tool is Windows only or Windows and Linux.
One such person showed me a web browser based PCB layout file viewer they vibecoded to review designs. It looks about as capable as the free Windows applications they can't run. They showed me how they click a feature and the entire net is highlighted. It had the layer selector to show any combination of layers. Etc, etc. They say they asked an LLM and it handed them that without any iteration or further input.
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Yeah, also for every nifty feature that maybe somebody's added 5 years ago in the enterprise software there's also a metric ton of random bloat, go-nowhere features and weird implementations cluttering everything up. If your business only needs 15% of the grand scope of whatever Enterprise Bloatware and it's a non-core functionality which you're using the bloatware for since it's the closest thing in market, you're also going to massively struggle to get any adaptions made unless you are a strategic-scale client.
Probably better bashing together with AI at that point.
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Counterargument: Google Docs. It's a 80% copy of MS Office, but it has managed to carve out a niche. Why can't a small, fast and free copy of MS Office do the same?
To give a more complete answer, a lot of these products used to exist, but were slowly discontinued, not because of some grand conspiracy to make people pay more but because they didn't sell. Probably the best example was Photoshop Elements. Yes, you could d a lot with Photoshop but yes, it was expensive software designed for the professional market. So Adobe came out with a stripped-down version designed for consumers. It didn't sell, and wasn't widely adopted despite being bundled with a number of consumer-grade digital cameras. The reason it didn't sell well is that if you advertise something as lacking features, the consumer feels like they're missing out on something. And usually they are. Every digital photography handbook out there talked about curves and how useful they were. Elements, however did not have this feature. Why? Well, there are other ways to adjust contrast and the like that will get you 80% of the way there, which should be good enough for most people, and they need to keep something exclusive to the full version. Sure, the average user may only need 15% of the features, but it's a different 15% for each user, and if you distill a product to only the basic features that everyone uses, you get a product that doesn't work for anybody but the most basic user.
The one suggestion I've seen to combat this has been to make the software modular, so that you download a version with basic functionality but can install modules for more advanced features. This doesn't work either. In the late 2000s iTunes was the king of the digital media players but was starting to get slow and bloated. The best free alternatives were MediaMonkey (which had the best kind of paid tier—not essential but absolutely worth the modest cost) and MusicBee, both of which realized that the marketing features and store were to blame; they got rid of this crap but otherwise offered products with even more features than iTunes. Winamp, with its totally stripped-down nature, predated iTunes and had widespread adoption. After it was formally discontinued, it was ressurected as Foobar, which kept the bare-bones functionality but offered a modular design so that more advanced users could expand functionality. I tried using this, mainly because it seemed to be what all the cool kids were doing. The problem I had was that it was a pain in the ass figuring out what modules I needed and then installing them. Want to do x? Download a plug-in and get it to work. Repeat 50 times. And this was with a piece of free software; imagine having to pay for each of these modules. Elements doesn't come with curves, but you can download a module for $30, or get it for an additional $2/month added on to your subscription. Repeat 50x. Suddenly full version looks like a good deal, and the modular version looks set up to nickle and dime consumers.
Of the three possibilities, living with the bloat is the one that makes the most sense. Look at the developer forums for any popular open-source software and they're loaded with feature requests. I don't see anyone responding that the software is perfect and don't add anything to increase bloat. Or keep everything as a separate plug-in because I like the version of Gimp that only lets me adjust tone and contrast and I don't want it bloated with your stupid curves and brushes.
Digital Audio Workstations still make those "stripped down versions". I think consumers also feel insulted that they're not getting the "real deal" version. What do you mean this consumer level bundled DAW is limiting me at 8 tracks? My creativity has no bounds, it cannot be held by only 8 tracks!
Never mind the fact that the majority of these consumers probably barely touch the software to begin with, and when they do use it, 8 tracks is likely more than enough. And that some of the greatest, most creative music of the 20th century has been recorded on 4 track analog recorders, let alone 8 tracks with the convenience of digital tools!
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Because Google Docs already exists.
There are already free versions of all these. All of these are probably going to get better a lot quicker, but they still won't do the enterprise stuff that gets the big subscriptions
edit: this comment was made without seeing Brainwavez reply. Great minds, etc.
When Google Docs came out, Microsoft Office already existed. And these projects don't have to get massive enterprise subscriptions to have an impact, they just need to prevent other people from subscribing to existing suites.
I comment more extensively above, but Microsoft Works was a thing. And nobody bought it, because nobody wants to miss out on functionality. Google Docs has its fans, but I tried to rely on it for work (nay, a company I was contracted to wanted everyone to work in active shared documents so if work had to be reassigned someone else could jump right in) and it was brutal. I ended up just doing all my work in Office and uploading it as a Google Doc to turn it in.
Microsoft Works--now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. My admittedly shaky memory says it was clunky, the file format was annoying and (IIRC) wasn't as widely supported, etc. etc. It seemed to be the M$ attempt to clone AppleWorks, and not terribly well, either, so Works was something most folks ended up getting by virtue of it being bundled with their Packard Hell or whatever. You know what? The more I think about it, the more I'd agree that it's a good example of your point.
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I'm not sure your larger comment addresses the argument. Google Docs might not have worked out for you, but it apparently it has a billion active users. Any longpoast trying to explain why nobody wants it, is simply resting on a false premise.
Google Docs apparently has 1 billion active users against 750 million for Microsoft Office. Yet, the same source says that there are only 6 million paid Google Workspace users. This is a conversion rate of 0.6%, compared to Microsoft's conversion rate of 100%, since they don't offer a free product, on 75% of Google's total user base. To put it another way, there are about 125 times as many paid Office users as paid Docs users. Also keep in mind that I would be included among those 1 billion users because there are still things I use it for, just not as a substitute for Office. But I wouldn't pay for the product, and evidently the vast majority of people are with me on that.
And that's the entire point. People have proven time and again that they aren't willing to pay for a stripped down product. The fact that they use it if given it for free is irrelevant.
Again, it doesn't matter if you generate subscriptions, it's enough if you prevent someone else from generating one. Especially that thia whole topic is about AI, and people generating their own software on the fly.
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I am one of those billion active users, but as a tool that makes for easy sharing or quick projects that I do on my phone, not a replacement for Word or even Libre Office.
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Because Google Docs already exists.
Or there are other alternatives: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice…this site list contains 7 more. And don’t forget LaTeX, Typst, and 100+ free markdown editors.
LibreOffice sucks, because no one wants to work for two months to fix a minor difference between it and Excel. LLM agents do not get tired and can get asymptotically closer and closer to the software they are cloning.
That's true. And AI could fork LibreOffice, but I suspect it would be faster and better to do a fresh port (and someone could test both, with barely any effort...but I'm not paying for the credits).
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