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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?
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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