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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.
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?
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.
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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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