I've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern.
I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.
In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.
The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.
And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.
The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.
The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
The moat for audio effects but especially guitar effects has never been just the quality of algorithm. Yes I know you and the teams at companies like Strymon and Universal Audio and whatnot have slaved over getting every detail right. But what makes Strymon the go to choice for so many players isn't just the sound you can get out of it. Because you can get those sounds elsewhere now.
The moat a physical pro audio product is its interface and its branding. And I know that's tough to hear especially if you're an engineer but its true. People buy Strymon pedals because they know exactly what they're getting and they know its going to be in a format where if you want to dial in a tone without getting into the weeds of menus you can (but if you need to advanced features you can also do that). If people wanted the cheapest way to get those sounds, they could always hook up to a live VST host rig. But you get Strymon because you know that brand name and you know you're going to get a box that you can twiddle the dials on the floor and yes you are also getting that as close to perfect algorithm as well. The sound is part of Strymon's branding but it isn't all of their branding.
Look at it this way, pretty much every original circuit design in the analog guitar pedal space has been copied, duplicated, sold for pennies on the dollar, modified, whatever. But those companies still exist and do well because their moat has never been the circuit, its the branding.
Anyway, I hope you find some peace in the next few days. Its hard to argue that your moat hasn't shrunk and maybe you're in the process of building up that customer base. You gotta think about the copycats and it sucks, but you always had to do that. Its just harder now.
I wrote something similar and decided to wait until the morning before sending. You said it better but I'm posting to hopefully give it more weight.
And don't forget, Behringer has been around and reverse engineering successful products as a business model. And I don't think they are putting anyone out of business because customers people know what they're getting when they buy knock-offs.
And, the stability of a hardware instrument or effect is considerably higher than that of a computer with 10s of software pieces (and licensing engines) interacting.
And in live music, this is rather critical; some musicians get it instantly, some need a single gig (even in a rehearsal) with their computer setup going dark or blocked or whatever to get it.
It was a fun project because it predates DSP chips by a couple years (1978). So there's an 8080 host driving some DSP boards made out of 7400 series chips.
I haven't written it up yet, that part is still hard :)
I paid someone on Upwork to trace the schematics into KiCad. Had LLM agents turn those into Verilog models. Lots of little mistakes had to be found and fixed at this point, it took months...
It seems like agents are a lot better at transcribing and grokking schematics now compared to 6 months ago, so it might be much easier now.
Agree that consequences for the future seem depressing...
Speaking as a hardware engineer, the moat did not vanish. You have simply assumed you were on the right side of the moat this whole time when in reality you dug half a trench and threw a glass of water in it.
If your firmware is open for someone to reverse engineer now, it has always been open. The real moat is firmware security, encryption, secure locked down hardware. Nobody, not even LLMs, can reverse your firmware if they can't obtain a cleartext copy of it.
You must use microcontrollers with security features, encrypted firmware, secure key stores. If you don't, you never had a moat in the first place. Your only security is the belief that it's too much effort to reverse your product. Security through obscurity is the moat that has vanished and everyone has been screaming for decades that this is not secure by any stretch of the imagination.
Maybe some of the newer stuff is better, but you're kind of overselling the hardware protection (lol). I'm sure everyone thought RDP1 on the STM32F1xx series was going to stop "bad guys" (or even RDP2, lol) but I was able to do better than Obermaier on firmware recovery of a F103 recently without going to the trouble of doing something like delidding a chip or even undersoldering it. The newer stuff is a little better, but a quarter in the Deepseek machine, some fairly common tools and patience, and even skids will be breaking into your invulnerable firmware fortress. I think the apocalyptic nature of all this just hasn't really sunk in for a lot of EEs or firmware developers.
A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.
Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.
Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.
Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.
> Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Moats and high walls, sure. But to this day, the absolute best way to stop any attacker is to dig a trench (most minus water) and to build low parapets, primarily of dirt, sand, barbed wire and ideally some anti tank stuff.
The B-52 analogy seems pretty spot on where the (relatively) sudden capabilities of Claude are similar to now having a B-52 where you can just fly around and find silly little moat/wall defenses and easily destroy them with your one-shot bomb-release button.
Take an audio stream, apply STT, interpret the result as an algorithm, run the algorithm, take its output, apply TTS, then send that audio stream to the output.
Connect the dots for me, I'm not seeing it. Unless you are talking about building a function approximator for a bunch of measured transfer characteristics, in which case you could as easily do that well before AI.
Can't help but feel that AI is the killing of the golden goose. We thought it would kill jobs, but it may just end up killing entire industries.
Intellectual property incentivized many and laid many golden eggs, but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
But who knows, maybe imploding the software industry is a good thing. I may lose my house in the process, but I think we could all get back to touching a little more grass.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
same reason I spent my entire career so far writing open-source code that anyone can copy ? (it's GPL, but imagine 100% companies actually caring about that). Ideas can't be owned.
Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.
You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".
Just stop this nonsense. Intellectual property is good. Free open source is not good. Anything that is free while take a lot of effort is essentially killing potential jobs. Wake up.
In a society rich enough to be able to provide for everyone (which it is) and where food and housing are abundant (which they should be), then things being free isn't bad because you aren't worried about making money to live.
You are the one who needs to wake up from the assumption that the only way to live is to hoard your intellectual products instead of imagining a society where you can stop having to compete on that level.
Not only that, rent seeking destroys jobs as a result of artificial scarcity and hoarding.
You pay $1000 to a monopolist instead of $100 to a small business and then having the other $900 to spend on whatever you want, like patronizing 9 other small businesses and actually getting something more for your money. The $900 in monopoly rent goes to Wall St instead of Main St and is used to e.g. bid up housing costs so people can't afford to buy a house.
The incumbents lobby for restrictive zoning or professional licensing gatekeeping to keep those rents high, which means fewer jobs doing construction.
It doesn't help you for huge corporations to get more of your money.
> But on the other hand, no IP means economy of scale is a lot more important, and that favors huge corporations.
"IP" is the thing that favors economies of scale.
Suppose you're a manufacturing company and you want to make your own computers. You're great at making the chassis and screen and batteries and things like that, but to make a whole device you also need an operating system, a compiler, a web browser, a CPU, etc.
If you're free to use existing ones then you have a chance. If you have to develop every one of those things in-house because every existing one is the property of an incumbent who is using it as a moat then you have to be a megacorp or you're sunk.
Notice that this is what all of the smaller companies actually do. Every small consumer device OEM and some of the big ones are using some variant of Linux/Android or BSD rather than developing their own OS. NeXT, the scrappy company Apple bought and turned into Mac OS X when they were themselves the underdog, was based on BSD. RISC-V has shipped more than 30 billion cores and is taking a decent chunk of the embedded market from ARM, which is itself a company that licenses its designs to companies that compete with each other (and run Linux on their chips) rather than using exclusivity and mandatory vertical integration to try to monopolize the whole supply chain. Which is how the mobile market went to them rather than Intel and Microsoft. Who themselves took the desktop and server markets from even more vertically integrated mainframe companies.
The availability of composition is what allows you to be a small company that does one thing well. Which is the thing you can't do when someone else has a monopoly on something you don't make but need, and correspondingly isn't willing to sell it to someone who is trying to compete with them in a different part of the supply chain.
Moreover, the economies of scale you're talking about on the other side actually have diminishing returns. Suppose anybody who wants to make a product that typically sells for $100 has to buy a $10,000 machine in order to do it, but then can make an unlimited number of them. If you're so small that you only ship 100 units, the cost of that machine by itself is adding $100 to the cost of producing of each unit and you're pretty screwed. But if you're a medium sized company and you ship a million units, it's only adding one cent. The advantage of the medium company over the small one is dramatic. Whereas the megacorp that ships ten billion units shaves it down to 1/10000th cent, but then the advantage of the megacorp over the medium one is still less than one cent.
On top of that, it's often something like you need a $10,000 machine that can make a million units even if you only use it to make a hundred, and then the scale advantage of the medium company over the small one is all still there, but the advantage of the megacorp over the medium one doesn't even exist because then to make ten billion units they need ten thousand machines.
Which is even before we get to diseconomies of scale: The larger an entity is, the more efficiency you lose to bureaucracy, coordination costs, principal-agent problems, internal politics, etc.
There is a reason industries with low barriers to entry tend not to monopolize. Why is there no monopolist who grows all of the coffee or weaves all of the clothing? Shouldn't "economies of scale" allow a single huge company to out-compete all of these little ones in the absence of anyone having a way of excluding competitors?
Conversely, find a consolidated industry and you'll generally find some kind of government-backed monopoly or regulatory capture.
AnthonyMouse gave you a overly lengthy rebuttal without getting to the point but the cost structure of IP is as follows: the marginal cost of making a copy is low enough to be negligible compared to the fixed cost of creating it.
This means the theoretical marginal cost is equal to the development cost divided by the number of paying customers. Where the development cost can either be a one time expense or an ongoing expense.
Companies make the fixed investment (or take someone else's fixed investment like an open source project) and they charge market rate pricing. The difference between the marginal cost (which is dropping with scale) and the market rate is economic rent or producer surplus. Competing companies pop up and work on their own product because they see the producer surplus and want a piece for themselves. This is how you get many companies wast the producer surplus on reinventing the same software over and over again.
Now with open source software you have the opposite problem. The marginal cost is zero, but the fixed cost still has to be paid. This means that the customer gets something that they would otherwise have to pay market rate pricing for free, this is consumer surplus. The marginal cost that the consumer would have to pay to keep the project alive becomes irrelevant the more consumers there are, which makes open source a financial tragedy because it fixed the cost structure problem at the expense of self sacrifice.
Are you from 1995? FLOSS won long ago. Services give companies far more money than software. Closed software it's dead. Custom services and in-place programming (adding features, interop...) for small non-IT companies gives far more money for IT companies.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
The same reason I have open sourced every line of code I have written in the last several years, even new inventions. Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
Better to be the one to open source it before someone else does.
The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
This has been debated about for quite a while, where people give donations in support or the "pay what you can" model.
Unfortunately, many have argued that it (donations or PWYC) doesn't work and people usually pay only when forced to. There is also the claimed psychological issue, where when something is made free or people can pay minimum amounts, that it is devalued or thought as near worthless. On the flip, various people and organizations have claimed that it's possible to use alternate models, depending on how it's done.
Do you think this will still apply for future generations? It seems like many people now are grabbing code either directly from model training or using agents to blindly scrape the web, finding code and customizing it without ever considering the author. Do you think individual contributors of open source code will have the same reputational incentive?
> The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
Which is why LLMs are going to kill most of the software industry. Software products and services operate on this assumption - package some functionality into an opinionated UI that makes some kind of work marginally more convenient, slap a brand on top, and you now have a captive audience and the perfect upsale/ad delivery vector, i.e. the user interface.
LLMs flip that around, because suddenly, your UI is an obstacle sitting between the user and the problem they want to solve.
> Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
I feel that LLMs are destroying the reputation building benefits as well. It used to be that most people's published code was a result of their personal effort and thought process. This is no longer the case. Not only are many new contributions written by machine, but the very process of understanding and reasoning about code has been devalued.
it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)
Somewhat related, but I sicced an LLM at my wacom's BT and USB packets to connect it to an unsupported system and the dang thing got everything decoded in 15 minutes. Can't wait to resurrect some old hardware I've got laying around.
> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours
When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.
The technology is powerful enough that it was bound to happen regardless. If it didn't happen here in the US, it would have happened somewhere that IP laws aren't respected.
I never said it was justified, just observed that it would happen and is happening, regardless of what "AI proponents" want to happen. IP law, like many laws regarding business practices, have and always had varying regulatory environments around the world when countries find it advantageous for their economies to have those environments.
Regardless of whether or not we agree with it, adherence to our idea of IP law is not something the whole world agrees upon, even before LLMs.
I don't think that's the rebuttal you think it is.
GP's argument is usually used in the sense of "if I hadn't done it, someone else would, so I might as well do it and the end result will be the same, except then I'll reap the rewards".
It's a crap justification for doing something unethical. But in many cases, even the unethical ones, it's also true, and I think in this case it is too. If the US had magically shut down every AI lab on day one, and banned all AI research, that wouldn't have stopped this train. Probably would have slowed it down, but not enough to really matter.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.
I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.
That's a nice vision but if AI and robots end up replacing most jobs then we're first going to suffer a total collapse in living standards across the world, until we replace capitalism at least. When the economy no longer relies on labour people won't have anything to trade in exchange for basic necessities.
The only way AI and robots end up replacing most jobs is if they can do them for less money than people can. Which in turn means that those things become less expensive, since that's the thing causing suppliers to do it.
So there are really three possibilities here. First, we get robots that can e.g. build houses and housing scarcity goes down, so now you don't need to make much money to afford rent. Second, robots still can't build housing, so then you get a job building housing and have a job. Or third, robots still can't build housing but we have a bunch of rent-seeking incumbents that won't allow you to get a job doing that either, because they're trying to keep rents high or artificially limit the supply of trade labor.
It's the third one that really screws you and is the one that we need to prevent.
Oh, think it will/can be worse than that. The collapse of the present system can mean all out genocidal wars, either by eugenic and deranged humans doing it to themselves or true AGI and its robots removing human interference with its goals and Earth's resources.
As for the AGI and robot part, various oligarchs are talking about manufacturing millions to even billions of robots. Combined that with billions of AI agents in massive data centers all over the world. A possible new artificial life form that can do what humans do (if not vastly better) and at comparable numbers or mass.
We all know that "real" communist societies like North Korea are worse, much, much worse. In fact within China how bad this is varies enormously. If you're in a "rope village" somewhere deep inland, having the finest house in the entire city is arguably worse than homelessness in Beijing, but the party won't let you leave except as homeless, because you're allocated a "Household" (Hukou) and you aren't allowed to leave.
And, of course, half the problem is the very structure of the communist party itself: local officials hide the problem, because if they don't, they'll be purged or at the very least won't see promotions, ever. Which means that the police will be using violence to hide the problem rather than fix it.
AI can provide incredible wealth, or immeasurable misery, in both capitalist and communist societies. That is not what makes the difference, that is just how political parties like to frame themselves and so the argument why you should choose "left" or "right".
Capitalism and private home ownership can certainly provide housing, but if you go too far or not far enough in private ownership and "protecting capital" they won't. And communism can certainly fix homelessness (the Soviets did, for example), except nowadays they just won't.
AI will provide more tools for people with capital, which primarily will be the government. Whether that solves, say, homelessness is a choice, in either system.
You missed the point and went on a tangent about random countries today.
I don't claim to have a solution for what comes after but it is certain that capitalism will collapse if we ever see significant job loss due to AI and robotics.
FWIW, they were right. Society may have ended up better off in the end, but the Luddites - the actual individuals affected by the transition, and their families and their children - were absolutely screwed for life.
1) Capitalism has historically been proven to work with 90% unemployment, unlike communism. Of course that would represent an enormous loss compared to today but it would not be enough to collapse it.
2) The same would happen to communism. Talk to someone from China and ask what their government will do when they can run the economy on 90% less people. The answer I've gotten is that they already know: after all the division between CCP/state jobs (which includes all state companies) and "normal" jobs already works like that. Then it was mentioned that there's a reason that people have committed murders for CCP jobs ...
I don't understand what you're complaining about. Yes, the US and Europe are capitalist, BUT there is more than enough room in the law for communist communities. Some of those existed for decades, and some still exist.
If you truly believe communism is better, why not just join one of those instead of dragging everyone along with you?
Intellectual property has rarely ever been "the golden goose", despite the anecdotes of the few Henry Fords that exist.
Throughout history, the golden goose has typically been owning capital, and having market reach (see: advertising, the silk road).
No matter how amazing your IP is, if you can't produce it at economically viable scales, and if you can't put it in front of people who will buy it, then you have nothing. So venture capital comes along, buys you out, and takes all your future profits in exchange for the "risk".
On the other side of the coin, there's open source software developers, PhD's publishing papers for free, and your local musicians that like to play at events just for funsies.
I mean, imagine the kind of world we'd live in if medicine were focused strictly on profitable moats instead of open research, and... oh. Right.
This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.
Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.
I hope your post history doesn't link back to your company or real identity because you probably violated some TOS and I'm not sure it's smart to name your competitors and openly admit you're thinking about repackaging the code you just stole from them.
I don't care either way but depending on where you live this might get you in trouble
Indeed. I'd like to remind everyone that with LLMs it's increasingly simple to build quite a good profile of someone just from their social media posts.
But that’s a good thing. Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it. And that means we can make better things.
It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world. I don’t care who reads my source code anymore, code is disposable. It’s expertise that matters now.
> It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world
Oh yes, this new world is terrible for rent seekers. It's like the kum-bah-yah free software world Stallman might have imagined. Information wants to be free and all. Can't stop the signal. Very counterculture. Like the Adobe clone apps.
Except for the closed SOTA model weights, out of reach hardware, and the resulting $200 subscription rent now paid readily both by anybody trying to create something new, and anybody who wants to rip it off. That particular flavor of rent seeking is booming.
I myself am a "rent-seeker" in an alternative sense of "I seek a way to pay for my own continued shelter via my creative output" and it definitely seems like it's gonna suck for me.
> Except for the closed SOTA model weights, out of reach hardware, and the resulting $200 subscription rent now paid readily both by anybody trying to create something new, and anybody who wants to rip it off. That particular flavor of rent seeking is booming.
SOTA only provides agents that are easier to manage. Such agents will likely also be made available in open models, as it is primarily a post-training issue.
Even if it never comes, the best open models are already capable of performing these tasks.
Yep. Current open weight models that you can run on prosumer hardware are on par if not better than Opus 4.6. And Opus 4.6 was deemed revolutionary in terms of performance.
The problem is that many of us seek employment from rent seekers. It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent and find placement and nobody wants to bring anyone new on board because they can't find ways to make it profitable.
> It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent.
To add to this, the Second Industrial Revolution started in 1870 and the 40 hour workweek became common starting around 1920. That's basically a lifetime.
If an asset doesn't exist to hold value, how do you "protect" expertise? How do you differentiate it? How do you justify investment if someone else will steal anything of value you create?
For a short while, it's great, but in the long run, it makes it difficult to financially invest in building software with either time or money.
It's fantastic for the rent seeking AI providers. They can squeeze users any which way the want and if anyone so much as utters a peep of complaint, they can be banned for life without recourse.
Everybody's moats have all vanished. It's getting to the point credentialism is people's only remaining leverage: only reason many people still have jobs is they have some professional credential that the AIs legally can't have. Doctors, lawyers, engineers whose signatures matter and who are liable for whatever happens. And even in those cases it's only a matter of time really.
Compute is the only true moat. Ownership of high performance computers will be the deciding factor in the future. Haves and have-nots will be determined by this.
> The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
There was never one to begin with. With a sufficiently good quality generator and a digital oscilloscope one could reverse engineer any kind of DSP - including harmonizers.
The real moat is the same as in every business - customer service, durability, warranty - things like that.
If someone vibecoded a clone of Valve's Steam nothing would change, because the system itself is not the thing that makes their business so valuable.
Isn't that kind of the same like Line6 emulating the exact electric circuits of amps and pedals, or like everyone and their dog is now building and selling Klon clones?
I think guitar effects have been mostly about doing the features the player wants, and marketing/brand/packaging, for a long time.
Brands only matter if there is some value to the brand.
People spend a lot for brands in music hardware because they know that brand cares and invests a lot into the quality of their product. It's not like a handbag where the value is primarily the status of owning something expensive (although there is obviously some of this too).
But if there's no real quality difference anymore people will rightfully ask why they'd pay the extra?
I think a more comparable example here might be SaaS products. People don't buy a branded SaaS product for the status of owning the brand. They just want to know if it will solve the problem they have. And if some AI competitor product can do that thing just as well either for free or half the price, then people won't spend what they used to for software like Photoshop.
Then you will compete on different things, i guess. For audio hardware, the physicality and experience of using it is important. Have better knobs, better usability, and the best algorithms!
Also, I guess with agents it should be possible to explore new algorithms more efficiently. You may discover something cool! And yes, anyone can copy it, but you will still have first mover advantage. Also, in music tech brands matter a lot. People love getting stuff from small “artisan” companies.
Do you think Chinese manufactures can't clone the hardware? Do you think they can't provide a premium product/experience? They most certainly can and do.
Just be different. Just create a brand. Oh if only it were that easy!
Boss still exists and sells pedals even though Behringer has made a $30 (more in the USA now thanks to tariffs) clone of virtually all of their guitar pedals. One of those clones (as opposed to the original) even being the best selling pedal ever.
That really must be scary. I'd hope at least in the world of music/audiophilia (where gold plates hdmi cables rule) you could focus on the upper ends of the market? Even if the sound is similar you hopefully will have an audience that appreciated the fit and finish and high quality components. Surely will be a challenge but when I see teardowns from China they almost always cheap out with paper caps and such. And while it may be exhausting perhaps you can turn it to your favor (where IP permits) to increase your product range? Godspeed though!
Already for some years. You can now buy decent metal (enclosure) guitar pedal stompboxes for 5 USD… who can produce for that? The only thing that counts is ideas.
A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.
Even so, if you can manage to get a agent into the loop of "change variable > inspect results > do change > repeat", you can replicate everything from server-side game servers to audio effects, as long as you manage to get the data into a format they can either "visually" inspect, or inspect by data. For audio, I've had success replicating synth sounds and effects by giving them MIDI access to analog hardware, spectrograms and a suite of other unix tools.
The tricky part is figuring out the workflow, once that's in place, you can encrypt the protocol itself as much as you want, the output (audio, video, JSON, whatever) has to go somewhere, and that can be captured and replicated.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of Opus or whatever Anthropic has just eliminates these capabilities. I mean, we got DMCA shoved down our throats. What's stopping them from doing something similar again, I mean, we have a 70 or 70+ year copyright laws now, lol!
Seems "information wants to be free" wins yet again. To bad we don't have any strong political leaders in the world that could run on such platform, I guess in 2-3 decades the tide will start turning the other way again.
The Chinese were already hacking your firmware if it was worth hacking at all. The only thing that's changed is that now you can, too. What's not to like?
Before the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
After the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
People should be aware that whatever they are doing with AI, the company they are paying subscription fees to and who owns the AI will usually know too. Your secrets are now theirs too, to sell to others.
After the Singularity (possibly): build good products, get reverse engineered and copycats offered, nobody wants to buy what they can get for free or have AI make for them, rather ask AI those support questions, forced into different kind of business.
everybody cloned stuff before. You keep your clients because you offer more than the lowest available price: the human touch (support, design, quality, problem solving)
LLMs only appear to do that, if they do it effectively is because you can.
Basically, AI has turned everything into open-source. People are likely to not buy your product because: (1) they can get it for free (2) ask AI to reverse engineer whatever you put out (3) they have no money (as out of work or AI putting them out of work soon).
The only winner (kind of), is the AI companies, with "token addicts" and subscription fees. But even that is in doubt, because of the data center debt[1][2] many are in and artificially low prices (to create addicts).
Unless laws are put up quickly to protect IP, which is doubtful (as courts and politicians are mostly clueless about technology), this has become the new weird reality.
[1] https://archive.ph/wWY2g
(Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’)
Protect IP from what? The fundamentals of the situation have not changed. The only difference now is that the models are doing the work.
Replace 'models' with 'humans', and you get bog-standard RE. The models just accelerated the timeline where this scenario would've happened.
The solution you propose already exists in its primitive form: It's called Section 1201 of the DMCA. What you're asking for extends that protection to the whole program, not just the DRM, and thus killing all of reverse engineering altogether.
------
Copyright as it exists is no different than real estate: Landowners extracting rent from properties they own, in exchange for promises on routine maintenance & upgrades.
What we have now is a machine that can look at a building & remake it to at least 90+% similarity, given enough iterations.
Actually, there are also protections against reverse engineering in many software licenses, so that goes to court under various contract laws.
No matter which laws are used in the attempt to protect IP, it requires lawyers and going to court, and the little guys will usually have neither the money or time to fight.
Maybe so, but people don't always buy a product because it's the best possible one, or because they're locked into an ecosystem ("moat"). Think of all the products out there that don't rely on a secret algorithm. How are they successful?
Well, reverse-engineers could have done this before, but you didn't pay one $3,000 to do it. You paid Claude $30 or whatever to do it. So all that changed was the cost, and the bar is now a lot higher to make a product people will pay for. Furthermore, no one signaled to the market that there was value there, so no one in China reverse-engineered it for $30 before AI. Makes me wonder if these "award-winning" algorithms are valuable due to prestige alone.
I don't really think software was ever the moat with these kinds of products? The moat with hardware products has always been access to electrical engineering talent and access to cheap assembly/manufacturing. And marketing. And the $$ in your pocket to fund all the above without having sales yet.
I have written probably a dozen software synthesizers over the last 20 years, for fun, never profit. I would have preferred those to be hardware products. But I lack all of the above. As do most.
I have worked in several embedded companies. The software that runs on them was often considered to be the least important part of the expense chain despite involving the most amount of total work hours.
This is interesting. I don't know if this is just cope, but it makes me think of how the schematics of a Soldano SLO100 are readily available. A true feat of engineering. Anyone could build one because the information is out there. Why don't they?
I know that it's much easier to get JLC to make a board and then flash some stolen firmware on it than it is to build a tube amplifier, but musicians are weird creatures.
All I know is, I would rather be in the before times.
The only solution is reputation and selling to the public domain, instead of to individuals:
if people like your stuff, you'll have a reputation because of what you made in the past, then you can offer to release your next project to the public domain if some crowdfunding goal is met.
That is possible, crowdfund the money up front based on reputation or the buzz surrounding the idea. The more popular something is, however, the more likely it will become a target for copycats.
Part of the issue is that people can feed the idea, descriptions, and pictures into the AI. Thus create knockoffs, for their crowdfund or as the basis for their similar software.
If the original person ever actually releases software, they can buy a copy and feed to the AI, to then beef up the features in the previously created similar software. The difference between the original and copycats can be few to just about none.
Unless the original creator is willing to fight it out in court, there is little they can do about the situation. Updates made in the original, can be "transferred" to the copycats. AI makes the speed and quality orders of magnitude higher.
It's happening. Check Artcraft. And Adobe could still profit from it. Custom plugins for companies, interop, optimization, rock-solid polished releases (and more optimized than ever) than vanilla MIT builds...
Also as a plus every user would be trained on Adobe's workflow. Companies would just pay Adobe for stable releases... and support. Ah, yes, the LLM's... sure.
But when you have humans on your side, things get explained much better, even if Adobe points to an AI too to troubleshoot. They know how to explain problems to an AI and tell the best solutions to the user back and forth.
How that's all going to go down remains to be seen, because it's not clear how Adobe and Microsoft (who have very deep pockets) view the situation or what their response is going to be.
While it is true that money could possibly be made indirectly and around the product (e.g. training, support, ads), the questions surrounding doing the equivalent of turning their IP into open-source remains. Usually, dominant companies don't like change or having to figure out new ways to obtain revenue, other than what's direct and obvious to them.
As for customization and plugins, that looks to be an AI versus IP problem too: (1) that companies would turn to Adobe or Microsoft, versus using their own AI (2) 3rd parties reverse engineering their plugins with AI.
Most likely way that it appears possible, is some type of licensing deal between the AI company and the original IP owner. Would be surprised if they do that smoothly, prior to lots of court fights, because corporate types usually don't like to share.
They can't prevent people from making their own in-house clones. They can take down Artcraft/whatever OSS repo but it's meaningless. I have my own C++ Photoshop/Office clones that I've been using for a few months now. Full replacement for anything Microsoft/Adobe has put out. How are they going to prevent me from using my own code? Or how will they prevent anyone else from just vibing up another Artcraft replacement (in case it gets taken down)?
True, at the moment, they can't stop the AIs or who is already in possession of the code. But, they can go after anybody hosting that code (as they have done similarly before).
And the AI companies themselves are also a target, to disallow asking or performing the reverse engineering of designated IP.
Any company that's of the US or from other friendly countries, will not stop courts from going after those hosting certain IP (if it goes down like that) they say should be taken down.
Yes, the counter would be to decentralize, but that doesn't stop going after the AI companies too. At the very least, a type of chilling effect can be created, where people and especially companies (with more to lose) would not want to risk using.
From the looks of it, the court cases are coming. Have no idea how things will turn out, other than this looks far from over.
Musicians want electronics made on schematics from 1930's with better quality parts or designs of wood and metal from 1400-1800. (Ones with sponsors even use the original pieces and not reproductions, check any large orchestra.) And then there's the ones using only/mostly software... based on circuits from 1930's and simulating math and designs from 1400-1800.
I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.
The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.
If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.
Yes be able to give new life and maintain compatibility with old hardware and/or unsupported OSes is one of the recent positive aspects of agents with frontier models!
Also managed to bring back compatibility old printer with Linux and even unsupported one working only over bluetooth!
Before this era, you could imagine how it could work but would have rarely taken the time to do this grunt work.
Now you ask, wait for a few minutes, do so meat proxy integration testing, iterate a few times and here you go.
Just release it under a pseudonym. The worst they will do is force it off GitHub! Don't redistribute the firmware files if you're really concerned. I am also sort of struggling with this idea so I get where you're coming from.
I wish someone would Fluxer [1] GitHub for self hosting.
It is a bit of a pain to make an anonymous GitHub account. That's literally what this whole identity is (I'm making a Nitter style frontend for a meditation app and I'd rather not take any chances). At this point just use a residential proxy like the Telegram people.
[1] Fluxer is an excellent most promising privacy focused Discord clone.
The UI is almost an exact copy of Discord, which, despite what people will say, is actually very good. More privacy focused alternatives should rip the UI of their competitor if it's good so that users get the benefits of more privacy while knowing exactly how the service works.
> Every device you buy wants you install an app on your phone. Not if I can help it.
That sounds interesting. What's the usual approach, install the app in some emulator or something, and ask your agent to reverse engineer it? Or is the setup for the agent to work simpler than that?
yes pretty much, spin up a vm, run your coding agent of choice and ask it to reverse engineer whatever part of the app you need. You dont need to setup the emulation sandbox or even download the app, agent can take care of that.
What if someone made an AI that reversed engineered hardware, then looked up if any patents were infringed upon, then emailed the owners of said patents?
That would be very shitty.
Why would someone do that? To frustrate the patent system, or AI.
If you don't use the router they provide, they literally cut your line. They don't say anything about this or ever explicitly clarify this, but they will cut your line, their customer support will accuse you of having bad equipment, and then even when you connect their equipment, the line will still be cut until you call them and have them reconnect it. Once they have, your own equipment will work again too, until they notice and cut the line again. It's ridiculous.
You can, however, use their equipment as a dumb modem and insert your own router downstream. It thankfully supports DMZ to expose your router directly to the internet without NAT. I use Ubiquiti.
So, in theory, I could just reverse-engineer the old Wacom tablet I have with no driver support for the M-series processor and build me a driver so I can continue using it? (there is a driver but it seems it will stop working with the next OS update).
As an aside: I tried using claude to write GTK4 applications in december 2025/january 2026 and it was awful at it, barely even helpful. Then in September it's writing great gtk4 apps with barely any prompting.
The capability ceiling of models in general has risen massively in not even one year. Back in 2025, I also found them to generally be a net-negative expense of time and effort. I wouldn't universally make the same claim today.
I have KEF LSX II LT speakers on my desk. They sound wonderful, but they have this annoying issue in which waking them from standby plays REALLY LOUD music for a second or two before settling on the correct volume. It's jarring, and it's a widespread issue.
In a few hours yesterday, I built a macOS menu bar app [0] that ramps up the volume when the USB output is triggered. This is not reverse engineering but an effective workaround.
I am tempted to try to reverse engineer the speakers and see if I could fix them myself. But 1) I have a feeling they have security features enabled and 2) I would rather not brick this rather expensive pair of speakers.
AI is incredible at making things viable (time-wise) that weren't before.
As an example, to show off my LLM-reverse-engineered-hardware project: a user-space driver and software for an old FireWire to USB box, the manufacturer drivers for which were last updated in 2006 and don't really work anymore on modern OSes (and never worked on Mac). Firewire these days in general is also incredibly buggy (needing legacy drivers for PCIe cards, software that wasn't updated since 2006, etc).
With a modern app, even something written in a few days, is already so much more pleasant to use and less buggy, than _all_ the old options that people were using before.
The hardware is quite unique because it's the only widely sold device(-family) that had a DV (FireWire/1394) connector for connecting mid-2000s camcorders, allowing you to transfer video via USB on computers that didn't (don't) have a FireWire port. And internally it works by packing the digital DV video stream into USB, without converting it, so you get the raw, full-quality video data as it was on the tape, the same you'd get it with a "real" firewire setup.
I guess the downside is that if people find out that this old, unique hardware is useful now, it will become expensive and hard to find.
A few weeks ago, I had Claude develop a CUPS driver running over a Bluetooth connection for the mini photo printer Canon Zoemini 2: works great on Linux (NixOS), even though Canon only bothered to only support smartphones, never desktops!
Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole.
I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it.
Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.
I'm sure they're also using AI to build those infotainment systems these days, so I don't think the stability / usability somehow magically comes from the use of AI.
Probably it does come from the manufacturer not caring and just releasing the bare minimum, whereas hobby developers can, and want to, spend more time on getting things perfect.
Software is in the same boat. Licenses and obfuscation never really protected anything - it was just too much work/effort to copy. Now it's one prompt..
I had an obscure Alcatel modem/router laying around with undocumented hardware, where even the mainboard's CPU/SoC serial etc didn't return any results from any search engines.
Soldered UART pins on it, plugged my USB adapter into my computer, then asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware blob. Took DeepSeek v4.1 flash around an hour to get a full OpenWRT build-and-flash pipeline up and running, using an isolated podman build container and everything.
The outdated OEM Kernel made it easy to identify the SoC hardware. drivers and proprietary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver mods (not really legal btw, because they "conveniently forgot" to publish GPL'd source code). Driver mods were successfully reversed through analyzing the .so and .ko files with frida in another podman container.
Overall took me less than half a day to do all this, and now I have OpenWRT running on that device, compiled from source with the upstream modern kernel.
To me, observing all that, and how quickly it found encryption keys, signing mechanisms, encodings, binary formats, instruction sets, disassembling it etc by just looking at the hexdumps ... this would have taken me weeks if not months.
And now comes the kicker, all that cost me 0.86$
AI and reverse engineering is like tap water now. There's no reason to not consider using it, because it's so accessible. There's just absolutely no point in proprietary hardware and software anymore.
My current project after this: I've soldered the UART pins to a proprietary Xiaomi smartphone I had laying around, and I'm currently letting it reverse engineer the baseband firmware. Let's see where this ends up ...
> only to discover that in the time between me giving up and then trying again someone had committed code to SANE to support the scanner already…..it happens sometimes.
One of the best things you can do in these situations is to actually audit the code that was contributed against the code you have. If you have more than was contributed, you could potentially still make a contribution of what's missing, against the structure of the existing contribution.
Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?
Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]
Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.
Not that simple but yes, even as a decades long "macOSX" fan I would love to see the Mac finally unshackled. Maybe Apple hardware could become a bit more like the Apple II era again after all? Asahi up to latest hardware generation; fully reverse engineered drivers down to the Metal... it would be a dream.
All of those things already got reversed in the past. You just haven't heard of them because they don't really matter without you know, the support, software updates, the ecosystem and so on. What use do you have from one specific version of nvcc or the fw for one specific version of a watch? Your work will be obsolete with the next watch, that's why people haven't bothered so far.
Of course if it's cheaper, someone might, but the real barrier is really the whole first-party support, it's not the technical stuff.
Because with enough time "the market" reverse engineers everything that has mainstream adoption, but only you are going to reverse engineer something that only you care about
I've already done this (more or less). Rolled a fully custom from scratch written stack. I've gotten Darwin to work as a standalone kernel with a GNU-like interface on top. Planning on porting the full MacOS environment when I find the time.
Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.
I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.
In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.
The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.
And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.
The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.
The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.