this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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I cannot comment on this specific case because I have not looked at the source code or products, but there's a bigger story here that most people are missing. In the last week, LLMs have been used to decompile multiple video games into human-readable source code that can be easily modified by humans or LLMs. These have resulted in projects mixing elements from Mario, Elden Ring, Minecraft, etc. LLMs are now able to decompile software into usable source (and check if said source compiles to match the original, on a loop).
I am struggling to wrap my mind around the consequences of this development. It basically means that all commercial, closed-source software can now be pirated and modified at will, assuming you have the money to pay for LLM tokens for the decompilation process.
It means more software is about to go cloud-only. Decompiling Photoshop wouldn't have any value if all the actual work is done via cloud GPUs and raw bitmap layers are returned instead. Double bonus for the shareholders you get software as a service and you also get to rent compute by the dollar on top.
That's pretty scary. Hardware is already scarce because of datacenters. If companies like Adobe increase their need for hardware, it will prevent users from building powerful machines. They'll be forced to use lighter machines and access those cloud compute services, and things will balloon from there.
Cloud only would just make it more difficult but still not impossible. Packet data still needs to hit the network and with it, a lot of server information. Truly no software is safe anymore.
No why do you need Adobe anymore? They had a head start and it seems that is gone
I think what will be exceedingly interesting is decompiled drivers for proprietary and out of support hardware for FOSS. Then there's ROMS from a host of device types...