Interesting, if all software can be decompiled and copied what is the future of software. Will all software be SaaS? A time where the majority of PCs will be terminals? Game consoles are almost there. It's only a small jump for all software to go that way.

Edit: Here's a possibility.

The future of software is agent only software. We ask for a result, agent asks questions from us, agent uses the specialized software, user gets result. We subscribe to an AI assistant and specialized agents. We are almost there,at least the start. The future of PC's as we know them are numbered. OSs,CLI,compilers and whatever will melt into AI assistants. Say goodbye to writing software for people.

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vagab0nd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Non-SaaS, close sourced software is already dead, no? I think pretty soon we'll all be using bespoke software written by the AIs. I already use throwaway software designed for each job because it's so cheap to do so.

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edg5000 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder about this too. Although, cracking was always possible. So what changed is that people can now modify, improve proprietary software with zero technical knowledge. I can now tell Astra or Fable (maybe not Fable because of safeguards?) to add a feature to Adobe Photoshop and it might actually succeed even when prompting purely on a functional level (e.g. the functionality I want out of the program). It would take days, but I think it would succeed. Call it PhotoBench?

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unsnap_biceps 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A future of all SaaS only works if you can't just tell a LLM what you want and get a custom implementation. I've always done a lot of personal projects, but my velocity has increased dramatically and I've replaced a number of projects that I used to pay for with custom ones that work well enough. I can't imagine that SaaS is going to be a viable model unless it involves a community that wants a unified experience, like a multiplayer game.

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bitwize 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Even then, interact with a SaaS enough and you may be able to "distill" a spec out of it that's sufficient enough for an LLM to replicate it closely enough. If you feed the LLM screenshots or video of people using it, it will be able to recreate it even more accurately.

	▲	georgemcbay 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If you feed the LLM screenshots or video of people using it, it will be able to recreate it even more accurately. You could just have the LLM agent use the software itself and then duplicate the functionality it finds, don't even need the screenshots or video. Unless the software is doing something extremely novel, the LLM can just do this all itself after you point it toward a url for the software with instructions to clone what it finds there. It'll be interesting to see if SaaS companies and/or providers of internet services like Cloudflare try to stop this sort of agentic cloning of SaaS products. Like, obviously they would kinda want to if/when this sort of thing becomes commonplace, but how do you do it while allowing your software to be agent-friendly for non-cloning uses, and who is going to want to tell their customers they can't use agents with their SaaS for fear of their software being cloned? Kind of a bad situation with either option.

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Daishiman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most software organizations pay for is effectively a SaaS or something where software is a minor part of the artifact and support is where the real money is.