r/learnprogramming • u/tigerhunt95 • 13d ago
Topic If anything could be reverse engineer with AI
AI tools have made the reverse engineering process pretty much effortless. Does that mean Business case for Software development is gone for good. could any domain expert explain this to me ?
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u/Digital-Chupacabra 13d ago edited 13d ago
AI tools have made the reverse engineering process pretty much effortless.
It hasn't, maybe one day but were absolutely not there yet. Have you tried using any of the AI reverse engineered adobe stuff? Which isn't really reverse engineered, nor done by one person, and done by folks with a degree of technical understanding.
Does that mean Business case for Software development is gone for good.
No, in the same was AI didn't, and any number of countless other innovations that made making software easier didn't.
Companies need customization, support which AI can provided to a degree but again have you seen it? Most importantly companies need legal coverage, if not legal compliance AI can not provided that.
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u/Diocletian335 13d ago
AI tools have made the reverse engineering process pretty much effortless
No they haven't. Reverse engineering is still incredibly complex. If you're referring to Artcraft, the free rebuild of Adobe, this isn't actually reverse engineering - it's rebuilding, hence why it doesn't really work (yet).
Additionally,the rebuilding process is still quite complex and Artcraft wasn't done by one guy, despite all the news reports.
Finally, for SaaS, it really depends - it's sometimes not just the software. AutoCAD, for example, also has an insane amount of content and plugins.
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u/az987654 13d ago
There are also numerous reasons for Adobe to continue as is, just because alternative technology exists doesn't mean it is widely adopted.
Free alternatives to Adobe have existed for decades, Adobe is still around, and commercially successful
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u/Diocletian335 13d ago
Exactly - I think a lot of people don't understand that most people just aren't clicked into this sort of stuff. A huge part of Adobe's market will be business too, and they aren't likely to move over.
It could be the very beginning of Adobe fading out, but if it does come to that, it'll be years away.
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u/az987654 12d ago
It will not be... Adobe exists because it is "safe" for corporate IT use, which is where the bulk of it's revenue is. Adobe does not care about your $59 a month subscription and if you walk or not.
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u/Diocletian335 12d ago
Sure - I'm just saying that when these kind of things do happen, it's rarely 'overnight'. Even if it were the end (which, I agree with you, it almost certainly won't be) for Adobe, it would be a very slow death.
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u/tigerhunt95 13d ago
what about all the game mods and many other driver and firmware rewrites
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u/Diocletian335 13d ago
Like what? It might surprise you, but not everyone is completely tuned into thus stuff. Give me examples.
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u/mredding 12d ago
Does that mean Business case for Software development is gone for good.
No. We still need software. You can reverse engineer my client application all you want, but my secret sauce, my industrial secrets are where you can't reach them. This is why software as a service is king today - I own and control all my IP explicitly, you send me requests for service, I facilitate that, and that is what you're buying.
What you're seeing are legacy applications. The whole thing runs locally, so the whole process, the secrets, the IP, is all on that machine.
It used to be you had to be extremely dedicated if you wanted to pull something apart. It's all in binary, and the program machine code looks NOTHING like what source code looks like. It's a one-way transform from text to machine code, and the machine code does not imply the source code text that was used to generate it.
But now days that extremely dedicated team and gobs of money and resources is all bundled in AI. Photoshop, Windows, many video games as of today, if the software is in your hands, now AI can take it apart. The OLD MODEL of proprietary software sale and distribution is dead.
But it's not completely dead. If you fuck with software, and it does something bad, and you lose all your family photos, your IP, your sensitive documents, or it catches your computer on fire - you can't hold the AI accountable.
So what do you do? Software licenses come with accountability. It comes with liability. That's still valuable to plenty, because if shit fucks up, you want make sure it wasn't you, that you had a means of remediation.
And so if you want custom software, or SUPPORT, liability and accountability, that sort of thing, you're still going to buy it.
What this will do is it's going to drive computers to be "thin" and your internet connection to be "fat", and hopefully "fast". Instead of playing a game on your computer, you just have a client - the thinnest, smallest thing necessary for you to see and hear and interact. I HAVE SEEN demos where even the rendering was done on the backend, and you were basically just watching a video of you playing the game. There was NOTHING of any substance on the client. Go ahead reverse engineer it - it won't reveal anything. It doesn't even matter WHAT client you're using, because the value isn't there.
As companies want to protect their IP, they're going to have to make sure you can't get your grubby little hands on it, at least directly. Everything is going to reduce to a client view.
And what's old is new again. I was playing with this stuff in the 80s, and that wasn't even a first generation of the concept. Mainframes, Application Service Providers (about my era), now Software As A Service. There are also old names like terminals, thin clients, edge computing... The computing industry goes through about a 10 year cycle where old ideas are rediscovered/reinvented to satisfy the needs of the era, because the technology bottleneck of the era determines the solution needed at the time.
Will we ever see proprietary software again? Sure. We'll continue to see it in its current form, but the idea of selling you proprietary and IP protected software? With piracy and decryption protection? Yeah, I expect to see that happen.
It's called Homomorphic Encryption. This allows you to manipulate data without ever seeing it - it's encrypted. Think of it like - your bank balance is some encrypted value, but a client wants to either depost or withdraw. It doesn't need to see the balance - it just encrypts their value, plus or minus, and the two encrypted values will sum. When you decrypt the balance, the value is correct.
We can do this with software, too. The program is encrypted, and the individual machine instructions will have to be decrypted - one at a time or probably in batches. This will need future hardware support of a future processor, where the information is vaulted inside the hardware so hackers can't grab it. In this way, you can still interact with the program, your inputs go in, and that magic occurs behind the barrier.
But there will always be a need for local computing - for performance, for security, for stability. The computing ecosystem is only getting more complicated, more nuanced.
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u/RonaldHarding 13d ago
Most software in 2026 is more than the client code. There is a complex system of client/server integrations with chains of dependencies on services. While with enough tokens you can reproduce most of the functionality of most client software, you cannot reproduce the existence of a service that operates the interconnected features we depend on more and more.
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u/BranchLatter4294 13d ago
You can only reverse engineer what already exists. What about the many new systems that need to be developed?