Replit CEO Amjad Masad stated that AI-driven reverse engineering and decompilation have become absurdly effective, and soon all software will effectively become open source. He added that AI is rushing towards everything and everyone.

The post did not include new decompilers, benchmarks, or vendor lists. The discussion immediately split into two layers. Some wrote that decompilation does not grant redistribution rights, and licenses remain valid. Others acknowledged that "de facto open source" makes sense: as long as a model can restore enough behavior from binaries, it can understand, rewrite, or redo without needing the original source tree.

Sample responses were posted. One user ran an agent for about 8 days on the operating software of a set of Chinese laser equipment, which is still incomplete. The first 5 days were spent restoring machine code from binaries, and the following days involved having the model rewrite Pascal functions, aiming for the compiled result to be 100% consistent with the original functions. Another comparison noted that the re-compilation of Super Mario 64, which used to take years, can now be compressed to a few weeks. Previously, the same task relied on IDA Pro, Ghidra, LiveKd, SoftICE, along with almost unlimited time and money.

Masad has been leading Replit, a browser-based programming platform established in 2016. Users write code, collaborate, and deploy within a web interface, later adding agents that allow them to modify projects and go live. The company has trained its code models using publicly available code under a permissive license and stated that commercially friendly models could be open-sourced again. When agents need to run long tasks, orchestration is handled by infrastructure that can continue executing after failures.

This statement targets software where binaries exist but source code does not. Cleanroom rewriting must avoid original code, while decompilation works backward from machine code. Both still face licensing issues: understanding does not equate to being able to publish copies of the original work. Executable files, firmware, and device control software are thus categorized together, with closed source reduced to a legal shell, while behavior can be aligned function by function by agents.

The buyers are device vendors, security personnel, and developers wanting to redo functionalities who need to understand closed-source binaries, while the sellers are software and firmware vendors that still charge for non-public source code. This expectation is driven by the decreasing cost of tools, not the expiration of copyright. Money flows from the annual labor hours of manual reverse engineering to agent hours. Those who can rewrite behaviors into compilable functions benefit, while those relying solely on binary secrecy without services, data, or account locks face pressure on licensing fees.

After the post was published, likes surpassed 8,000, with retweets and quotes increasing. No company announced open sourcing in this post, nor did any court redefine the boundaries of decompilation.

Source: Public Information