Without commenting on Microsoft and Adobe specifically, because I couldn’t care less about their fates, I find the prospect of no longer being able to make a living from making and selling software deeply depressing.
I could put my heart and soul into an app, stick it on a marketplace, and someone gets their LLM to RE the binary back into source code to repackage and distribute it. LLMs were built on theft but now they enable even more of it. As a SWE I’m quite demoralised.
I really did want to get out of selling my hours to an evil corporation by instead selling my own works of passion as apps, but this has really thrown a spanner in the works. I don’t want to have to use an always-online SaaS/licencing model instead, because I believe consumers should own things. This does feel like the final straw pushing me out of software entirely.
People aren’t as opposed to paying as the loud people on the internet would suggest. Particularly if it is the best software around, hence why Photoshop, AutoDesk, etc have such a stranglehold. Even more so if you’re marketing to a business. Is a company really going to use a vibe coded app, or pay their engineer to spend time decompiling and reverse engineering your app while production grinds to a halt, and THEN somehow maintain vibe code, or are they just going to pay for the thing that works and that they can use right now? Similarly, game piracy has never been easier, but Steam makes money hand over fist. Many piracy sites I’ve seen refuse to crack indie games.
I’m not telling you what to do with your life though, it’s a gamble to be sure.
Without commenting on Microsoft and Adobe specifically, because I couldn’t care less about their fates, I find the prospect of no longer being able to make a living from making and selling software deeply depressing.
I could put my heart and soul into an app, stick it on a marketplace, and someone gets their LLM to RE the binary back into source code to repackage and distribute it. LLMs were built on theft but now they enable even more of it. As a SWE I’m quite demoralised.
I really did want to get out of selling my hours to an evil corporation by instead selling my own works of passion as apps, but this has really thrown a spanner in the works. I don’t want to have to use an always-online SaaS/licencing model instead, because I believe consumers should own things. This does feel like the final straw pushing me out of software entirely.
People aren’t as opposed to paying as the loud people on the internet would suggest. Particularly if it is the best software around, hence why Photoshop, AutoDesk, etc have such a stranglehold. Even more so if you’re marketing to a business. Is a company really going to use a vibe coded app, or pay their engineer to spend time decompiling and reverse engineering your app while production grinds to a halt, and THEN somehow maintain vibe code, or are they just going to pay for the thing that works and that they can use right now? Similarly, game piracy has never been easier, but Steam makes money hand over fist. Many piracy sites I’ve seen refuse to crack indie games.
I’m not telling you what to do with your life though, it’s a gamble to be sure.