No Source Code? No Problem
queue.acm.org28 points by ibobev 4 hours ago
28 points by ibobev 4 hours ago
This has been an unexpected outcome of agentic coding for me.
I recently ‘rescued’ [0] one of my favourite video game series, No One Live Forever, which is kind of lost to IP hell. It’s been an enjoyable experience, I learnt a lot, and it’s feels great to have revitalised the game.
I'm with you, I wouldn't have expected this a year ago. While it's been awesome for the hacker ethos, I worry that it might be too much too quickly. Commercial software will push to online-only business models to protect their IP from decomplication. For legacy/retro software, this couldn't be better.
One angle I don't see anyone talking about (perhaps because I'm mistaken) is that this is terrible news for Nvidia. AMD also makes great hardware, but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.
> Commercial software will push to online-only business models to protect their IP from decomplication.
uhm.. My dude, AI can make entire apps just from a couple English sentences, it'll handle cloning an entire online-only app it can see.
I've always meant to play this, had actually asked GPT about doing a decomp jsut the other day, and it surfaced yours. Nicely done
(Article is from 2003 but I'll comment on the sentiment)
A new era of ownership is here.
I ported a closed-source game I'm a huge fan of from mac to iOS so I could play it on the go. No plans to release it; just sweet to play how I want.
The limit is your imagination!
(2003)
[dead]
All my monthly software subscriptions have been going bye-byte. No more Bookmap, Adobe, or Quickbooks!
I’m curious what Adobe software were you using that’s replaced, and with what?
probably https://getartcraft.com/ It's really shaping up, from the activity I see in Github.
There's a lot of activity, but not a lot of it is from people who know what they're doing. Photocraft is less usable now than it was on release, which is impressive. One of the latest releases (I believe 0.11) had a bug where choosing a color on the color palette would hard lock Windows and require a physical restart.
The authors should have a look at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152466