The End of Software Secrecy

This is exactly what made me bite the bullet and buy a Claude subscription back in February. It was very easy to evaluate how good the AI was if I _already knew_ what I was trying to build. A linter and its very well defined rules fit this perfectly. Plus the upside of building something that already exists is that you can scrape the internet for repos using the dependency, and compare your results to the original. I ended up finding a few bugs in the original linter rule this way!

Pretty much all of my recent projects have been focused on re-implementing or opening up the lid on some piece software. I have opted to not go the decompilation route (in some instances I can't even download the original software!), and instead reverse engineer using publicly available files that the programs create. Definitely a lot slower, but it's fun to build your model of how these opaque binary formats work and slowly watch your golden tests trend towards 100% matching. Also it's super cool to see the variety of use cases people had with the original software, and I definitely wouldn't have been exposed to many of these things had I not scraped all of Google for everything I could find related to the software.

> The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.

It’s a Pyrrhic victory given the negative impacts of LLMs on open source projects.

Everybody’s closed source applications can be reverse-engineered, but due to 10,000 line “contributions” from LLMs people won’t want to create the free/open source communities that used to exist.

So what’s the point of keeping the source open? Stallman’s original problem of fixing a printer driver would be resolved today by getting an LLM to read the binaries.

The LLMs can make the binaries human-readable, but also make human readability a secondary concern. The phrases “closed source” and “open source” have lost meaning.

Yup, reverse compilers can figure out the code but they won't let you see the .exe I suspect. Corporations can steal from people's knowledge and crowd source stuff but people won't be able to steal from them. Same old same old.

A lot of words for something that's not important at all, if llm agents can do it, it means human can do it since then, I mean...

I for one am excited for the golden age of game modding that is coming. People like to talk about “commoditize your complement” and in this case I expect modding friendly publishers to reap the rewards of this dramatic shift.