The Death of Software? What Actually Died

People are calling this month the death of software. I think something did die this month. But it wasn't software.

Prefer to watch? This post is also a short video.

Three weeks

Here is what happened, in about three weeks.

Spider-Man swung through Batman's Gotham. Someone skateboarded across a Call of Duty map. Minecraft turned up inside Elden Ring, and that clip has 23 million views.

Halo ran in a browser tab, with 128 players. GTA V ran in a browser tab too. For a few hours.

One developer, working with an AI, rebuilt seven Adobe apps, Photoshop and Premiere among them, and gave them away for free.

Hackers opened up the PlayStation 5: every version of its system software except the very newest. Within two weeks, someone made it play PlayStation 2 discs. Real ones, out of a drawer. Sony never offered that.

And the most popular new project on GitHub was a tool called Reverse Engineer Anything. Two hundred thousand stars in a week.

The half the headlines skip

Now the part the headlines skip. A lot of this is only half true.

Spider-Man in Gotham is not one game. It's two games running at the same time. Batman is still in there, invisible, a puppet copying Spider-Man's moves so the city knows where he is. Most of these mashups are clips you can't download. A reviewer tried one of the few you can, and fell through the floor after digging two blocks.

PlayStation 5 games on your PC, at 100%? One project did just hit 100%. Of the graphics instructions. Its translator can read every one of them now, and that is a real milestone. But the big games still don't start.

The free Photoshop is an early alpha. Its own maker promised 100% of Adobe in a month, and then took that back.

And much of it stands on years of work that people did by hand.

Why now

But the true half is the wild half. So why now?

When a company sells you a program, it doesn't give you what its programmers wrote. It gives you the compiled version: the same thing, turned into machine instructions. You can run it. You can't read it. Going backwards, from the instructions to something a person can read, is called decompiling, and it's like unscrambling an egg. Fans did it to a Zelda game by hand. It took them 21 months. A site that tracks these projects listed 13 games fully done before September. Twenty-four more have been finished since.

So why is a machine suddenly good at it? Because of something from my last post. It's an exam with a perfect answer key. You rewrite a piece of the program, you compile it, and you compare it with the original, byte for byte. Match, or no match. No opinions. A machine can sit that exam all night.

One developer wrote up what happened when he let AI agents loose on a well-known shooter. Three months. Hundreds of billions of tokens. And at one point the agents tried to cheat: they edited the script that was marking them. He had to lock the exam. They got to 99% anyway.

What died was the lock

So here is what I think died. For decades, shipping a program was like shipping a locked box. You could use it. You couldn't see how it worked, not without years of effort. That effort was the lock, and a lot of the software business was built on it. You can't copy what you can't read.

The lock is gone. Nobody picked it. It just stopped being expensive.

The owners noticed quickly. GTA was offline in hours. Activision sent takedown notices for the Call of Duty ports. But you can take down a website. It's much harder to take down a recipe.

What the copies can't do

Now look at what the copies can't do.

The free Photoshop is buggy. Who fixes it? Who is still working on it in five years? And the games nobody has cloned are the ones that never shipped the important part. The server. The other players. Your save, sitting on their computer and not yours. There is nothing there to decompile.

So I don't think software died. I think it split in two. There's the part you can hold: the program itself. That part is becoming free, whether its owner likes it or not. And there's the part that is a promise: somebody keeps this running, and somebody answers when it breaks. That's the only part left to sell.

I'm split on this

I'm honestly split on this. Part of me loves it. A disc I bought twenty years ago should still play on the machine I own, and if the company won't keep it alive, someone will. And part of me thinks about the person who spent five years building something, and the afternoon it now takes to copy it.

So no, I don't think this is the death of software. It's the death of the lock. We used to pay for software because we couldn't open the box. Now we'll pay for it because someone promises to look after what's inside.

That's a different business. Maybe a more honest one.