Comment by nradov
6 hours ago
In the case of Microsoft Office native desktop applications the LLMs can figure out everything underneath through a mix of decompiling the binaries, reading the product documentation, and exploratory testing. Some SaaS is more opaque.
This is not true, most software can't be reverse engineered even if you had all of the source code, much less if you just have the binary.
Functionality piles on top of each other, products are such a garbled mess with fixes built on top of shaky grounds all over.
20% of software is code, 30% is design/strategy/marketing/telemetry/usage, rest of the 50% is lots and lots of stuff baked into software from user feedback over the decades.
Any software product that isn't in a similar balance is just crap to use, for instance Windows it's 20-30% code, 60-70% marketing/ads and the rest 10-20% bug fixes..
There is 0 user feedback being addressed.
In my opinion, AI is the thing that should be a wake up call for software companies to actually build on top of feedback proactively and with sharp intent.
I don't think you've been paying attention to what's happened in the last few months. The LLMs have gotten way better at reverse engineering and design. They might not be great at building a whole new product from scratch but cloning an existing mature application will be no problem within a year at most.