A developer built seven Adobe clones with Claude and released them free.
Brandon Thomas's ArtCraft is seven working Rust applications, clean-room replacements for software Adobe charges subscriptions for. His tagline: "software is over." He's early. I think the direction is right.
A shipped binary used to be the product. You compiled your logic and shipped the binary, and the binary was the moat. Users could run it. They couldn't read it. That deal just broke.
Free clones won't dethrone Adobe. GIMP has been free for thirty years and never did. What protects Adobe is distribution, workflow, the ecosystem around the code. But the binary was the lock on the logic itself, and the lock just broke.
The REA toolkit, AI agents hooked into Ghidra through MCP, went from under 10,000 to over 100,000 GitHub stars in six days this month. Reverse engineering used to take a specialist team months. Now it's an agent workflow.
Your binary is now your logic, exposed, sitting on hostile hardware.
The interesting question isn't whether this is legal. Activision and Bethesda are already answering that in court. It's what you build when you can't trust the binary in the wild. Keep the logic server-side? Move to web? Design for a compromised client?
We spent thirty years optimizing how we ship binaries. We might spend the next five figuring out how not to.