WELCOME TO THE POST-SOFTWARE WORLD
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Remember my post a couple of days ago about AI being used to recreate Photoshop? Well, I started digging into this story, and the implications are absolutely staggering.

And wouldn't you know it? There's a trail leading back to gamers.

For decades, video game enthusiasts have been reverse-engineering old games, figuring out how they work and rebuilding them to run on modern computers. AI has started making that process dramatically easier.

Here's a little computer science lesson. Software is originally written in something called source code, which is a language humans can read and understand. That code is then compiled into machine instructions, essentially an enormously complex arrangement of ones and zeros that your processor understands. Going backward, from machine code to the original source, is incredibly difficult because much of the information that made the original code understandable has been stripped away.

That's where AI changes the equation.

Traditionally, preserving and playing old video games often required an emulator, essentially a software recreation of the original gaming hardware. But there's another approach: reverse-engineering the original game and rebuilding it to run natively on modern processors, without needing to emulate the original machine.

Now AI is helping people do that kind of work at speeds that would have seemed ridiculous just a few years ago.

And somewhere along the way, somebody had a rather interesting thought.

What if we stopped doing this just for old video games and started doing it for commercial software?

And now we have PhotoCraft, an AI-assisted, open-source reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop, with similar projects targeting Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, and other Adobe applications.

These aren't perfect replacements yet. They're still early in development. But that's almost beside the point.

The remarkable thing isn't that somebody has already replaced Photoshop. It's that somebody can now seriously attempt to recreate something as enormously complicated as Photoshop using AI, without needing an army of software engineers and a gigantic corporate development budget.

Think about that for a minute.

For decades, software companies have enjoyed an extraordinary advantage. They could spend millions developing incredibly complicated applications, protect their source code, and charge customers indefinitely for access to the results.

But what happens when the cost of recreating that functionality starts approaching the cost of simply describing what you want?

What happens when one person with a computer and a few AI agents can begin challenging software that once took entire corporations years to develop?

I keep thinking about that wonderful scene from There Will Be Blood, when Daniel Plainview explains exactly what he's done to Eli Sunday.

"I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I DRINK IT UP!"

I can practically hear AI shouting that at the entire commercial software industry.

And here's the really wild part. You don't necessarily need to know how to program anymore to begin creating software. You can describe what you want, work with AI to build it, test it, improve it, and eventually release something that would have been completely beyond your abilities just a few years ago.

There are still plenty of technical problems, and creating reliable, professional software isn't suddenly effortless. But the barrier to entry is collapsing at a rate I've never witnessed in my 25 years of writing software.

We may be witnessing the beginning of the post-software world. Not a world without software, but a world where software itself is no longer the scarce, expensive commodity it once was.

And if that's where we're headed, the implications go far beyond Photoshop.

Welcome to the post-software world. Somebody just stuck a straw into the milkshake.