Episode: 81

An Honest Conversation

Back in January we asked a panel whether there was a future career for software developers in the age of AI.

Eight months later, Matt thinks we have an answer. He doesn’t think anyone’s going to like it.

This is a darker episode than usual, and deliberately so — not a hot take, not a doom spiral, and not another round of reassurance. Matt starts with the part he has the most skin in: a ten-year plan to make a living from small consumer software, built entirely on the assumption that people can’t build those things themselves. That assumption died this month.

What happened

Four things landed in the same week, and the timing is the story:

  • Photon (tenzen.studio) — a solo AI-built Photoshop clone, originally pitched as a fairer subscription. The reaction wasn’t what the author expected.
  • ArtCraft — clean-room reimplementations of seven Adobe apps in Rust, free and open source, stars and forks climbing by the day.
  • AnyPS5 — PlayStation 5 games running on a Linux PC at full GPU shader parity, via AI reverse engineering.
  • REA — one CLI and MCP server pointing agents at anything, from application behaviour down to native binaries.

None of these on its own is the bombshell. All of them inside one week is.

What we get into

  • Why the feature-parity number everyone’s quoting is a snapshot, not a state
  • Why it doesn’t matter whether Adobe can shut this down — and whether they brought it on themselves
  • Where Liam pushes back: the pool of people who don’t want to get their hands dirty is shrinking, not drying up
  • Capability is stopping being the moat. The moat is becoming risk — and not just risk, but appetite
  • Build versus buy as a liability decision, not a financial or security one
  • Doctors and lawyers building AI doctors and AI lawyers, convinced they’re insulated in a way we weren’t
  • Dr Google as precedent: GPs weren’t replaced, their job shifted from diagnosis to error correction
  • And the longer arc — if knowledge stops being scarce, what’s left to own?

The question is no longer whether proprietary software survives. It’s whether universal capability stays universal, or whether the people who own the infrastructure underneath it quietly re-dig the moat.

Matt’s also honest that all of this is speculation built on a week of anecdotes — which is why we end on the historical precedents for getting this exact call wrong, including a famous warning that turns out to be a myth, and has survived eighty years of being debunked anyway.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

Matt — a fever and a sunburn.
Liam — lawn bowls earlier, nothing in the glass now.

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