AI-powered clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop sparks debate that closed source is dead
latticecut · x · 2026-10-07
A repost thread on how AI is upending the legal landscape of software reverse engineering:
- Simon Willison reshares acroll's year-old "SaaS has a 24-month shelf life" take, adding the key variable: clean-room reverse engineering
- Traditional clean room: one person documents a system, hands the spec to a second person before a lawyer, who implements it independently to avoid copyright claims
- Now AI can decompile code, write a spec, and have an LLM implement that spec (e.g. in Rust) — classic clean-room approaches likely face new legal scrutiny that patent and copyright offices never anticipated
- The quoted original claims Photoshop is facing a clean-room open-source reimplementation: decompiled to source, processed into a non-code spec language, then fed to an LLM to generate Rust, concluding "Adobe just got nuked... closed source is dead" (that's the author's take; legal outcomes remain unsettled)
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