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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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