The software industry seems to be collapsing at remarkable speed these past few days.
One developer, using Opus 5.5, has built open-source alternatives to seven Adobe products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Lightroom. What once took a team years to develop, a single developer with AI can now prototype, fairly completely, in a short time.
Meanwhile, another open-source project on GitHub, REA, has quickly gone viral. Some are even declaring that closed-source software is dead and that we’ll never need to pay for software again.
That’s an exaggeration. But REA has indeed changed something big about software development: by installing a single MCP server, you can let an AI agent study the internals of closed-source software and turn its findings into its own code.
