> or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.
If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it. The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real quick, massive difference in just a few years already.
Right now you can point claude at any program and ask it to analyse it, write an architecture document describing all the functionality. Then clear memory and get it to code against that architecture document.
You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble any program and do the same thing.
Is there a driver in windows that isn't in linux? No problem. Just ask claude to reverse engineer it, write out a document describing exactly how the driver issues commands to the device and what constraints and invariants it needs to hold. Then make a linux driver that works the same way.
Have an old video game you wanna play on your modern computer? No problem. Just get claude to disassemble the whole thing. Then function by function, rewrite it in C. Then port that C code to modern APIs.
It'll be chaos. But I'm quite excited about the possibilities.
> You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble any program and do the same thing.
I have successfully created a partial implementation of p4 by pointing it at the captured network stream and some strace output. It's amazing how good those things are.
You don't even need to go down to assembly - most commercial software is trivial to disassemble calling a few EXEs. In theory this is largely forbidden by licenses, but good luck enforcing them now.
I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.
If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it. The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real quick, massive difference in just a few years already.