One of the earliest uses of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Claude was producing source code—computer language instructions that make up software which include word processors, your internet browser and everything else.
Code is structured, which makes its easier for AI tools to generate.
So could support to make fancy software we generally need to pay for? Enter reverse engineering: using AI tools to interrupt a piece of software down into component parts and then construct code to copy those parts.
Unlike vibe coding, wherein you tell AI what you want a piece of software to do and it tries to create it, reverse engineering works more effectively for large, complex programs.
In recent weeks, one software engineer used AI tools to produce what are essentially free versions of Microsoft Office and Adobe programs. Adobe is the maker of Photoshop. To make things more interesting, a freely available AI tool referred to as Reverse Engineer Anything has gone viral in coding circles.
Why should you care? Some people are hailing this as a return to the early days of the internet when software was free—both to use and to adapt.
Even if we don’t go that far, this new development really poses questions about how for-profit software will work in the future.
The cool kind of weird
In the early days of the internet, there has a cool kind of weird. In the 1990s, the internet seemed to provide endless possibilities, and no had discovered the way to monetize it yet. People spent a lot of time talking to strangers about their niche interests on chat forums and growing badly designed websites to share data with others.
Lots of software was free or open source. That meant if a piece of software didn’t function quite the way you wanted, you may download the source code and tinker with it till it did. Often, you’d do this with support from the internet, wherein technology searches were the second most common search topic.
It seems nearly impossible to imagine now, however Google didn’t exist but. Microsoft did, and fast have become the best-known proponent of for-profit software program: programs you have to buy and cannot tinker with yourself.
The 1990’s were consequently a battleground between free and open-source software, readily available to tinkerers, and for-profit software , of which Microsoft was the most vociferous manufacturer.
The birth of ‘big tech’
In late 1998, for-profit software got considerable protection in the form of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It made it illegal to try to attempt the break that locks that prevent tinkering. The future of for-profit software was secured.
And the internet went mainstream, no longer a clubhouse populated by using early adopters. You didn’t ought to be as “tech savvy” to buy for and use computer programs.
It was also the starting of the companies now called “big tech”: Microsoft already existed, Amazon (having begun in 1995) have became profitable in 2001, Google released in 1998 and Apple eventually went from niche, struggling computer company to a tech juggernaut after the release of the iPod in 2001 and, later, the iTunes Music Store. Facebook, the last of the original tech giants, released in 2004.
All of a sudden, free and open-source software was something used only via the technically adept. Developing it was a special interest. It was not possible to remix or improve or personalize most software, because accessing the underlying source code was technically difficult and illegal.
A new reverse-engineering utopia?
Arguably, as of reverse engineering does not break any locks, it may not infringe the DMCA, though this may face legal challenges.
Integrated with vibe coding, this new era of AI-powered for-profit software clones could be the starting of a time when everyone will have their most longed-for function in Excel.
All is not as it seems on this new utopia, although. Some of the software being formed is already reported as having weird bugs. Those bugs are probably to be hard to track down when a lot of the coding was done with an AI tool as instead of than a human.
File reusability could be a problem, too. If everyone is tinkering with their very own copy of Word, there is no guarantee files will stay compatible. You might be able to open a file in the “free” version of the software, however someone else using of an official Microsoft product may not.
The other big change since the early days of the internet is the importance of data. Even if you reverse-engineer Photoshop, it won’t contain the underlying data set that permits you to use Adobe’s proprietary AI tools. If you successfully reverse-engineered Facebook, you would not have access to the underlying behavioral data that makes its advertising so successful.
So, will reverse engineering take us back to the early days of the internet? Probably not. But it will likely usher in a new era where traditional ways of monetizing software don’t work anymore.
What will happen next is unclear. We can only hope that some of the balance of power among customers and creators of software is restored, and the future is at the least a little rosier.
