“Everything is open source now.”
No, it isn’t. Here’s what actually happened this month, and why the people who maintain software for 20 years aren’t going anywhere.
What happened
- REA (“Reverse Engineer Anything”) hit #1 on GitHub and passed 100K stars in a week. It lets AI agents like Claude Code use existing tools such as Ghidra to explain how closed apps work.
- Brandon Thomas used Claude to build free clones of Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom and more. His take: “software is over.”
- A week later, he shipped clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
What didn’t happen
Nobody leaked Adobe’s code. The clones are new code that looks like Adobe’s apps.
REA doesn’t give you source code either. Its own docs say so. It explains how a program behaves.
What really changed: understanding closed software got cheap. Making sense of decompiled code used to take years of practice. Now an LLM does most of it.
That’s real. But it’s not “everything is open source.”
The reality check
- The Photoshop clone had 800+ open issues after two weeks.
- In one test, REA got 30 out of 30 findings right, and missed 8 others.
- In another, a plain AI agent without REA did just as well.
Impressive. Not finished.
Code was never the product
Linux is free. Postgres is free. Kafka has been free since 2011. Companies still pay for all three.
They pay for someone to run it, keep it up, secure it and pick up the phone at 2 a.m. That’s the cloud business. (I work at Confluent, which sells managed Kafka, so I see this every day.)
Adobe works the same way now. Cloud sync, team libraries, AI features, licensed fonts, camera support on launch day. All on their servers. You can’t decompile a server.
A perfect clone copies the app. Not the service.
Version one is a weekend. Version forty is a career.
Photoshop shipped in 1990. A PSD from fifteen years ago still opens today. That’s decades of engineers keeping it working through every OS, chip and file format change.
Excel still treats 1900 as a leap year. It wasn’t. The bug came from Lotus 1-2-3, and Microsoft kept it on purpose so old spreadsheets wouldn’t break.
That’s maintenance. Nobody tweets about it. It’s most of the job.
The clones have Photoshop to copy. Photoshop’s engineers have nothing to copy. They decide what “correct” means.
AI is great when there’s an answer key. Maintenance is writing the answer key.
One security note
If any app can be read, so can yours. Keep secrets and business logic on the server. And when an AI tool says “nothing found,” that’s not the same as “safe.”
So
Copying an app got cheap. Running it, securing it and keeping it alive for 20 years didn’t.
That’s still engineering. And it’s not going anywhere.
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Senior Software Engineer at Confluent, based in Hyderabad. I write about building software and what I learn along the way. More about me