I’m not much of a gamer these days but The Elder Scrolls will always hold a special place in my heart, and as such I’ve been occasionally checking in on projects like Skyblivion — a fan-made recreation of Oblivion inside the Skyrim engine — because it just warms my heart to see the community still care about keeping these beloved worlds alive.
And hey wouldn’t you know it, Skyblivion actually releases this year! Took them long enough.
14 years to be precise.
But then you open Hacker News on some random ass tuesday and see a script kiddie with too many claude tokens adding SKATE 3 TO GTA V in a couple of days.
I mean LOOK AT IT. It’s Skate 3! Inside GTA V! In particular, this is not:
- A years long project to create a skating mod for GTA V that can never be as good as Skate 3
- A years long project modelling the entire GTA V map inside Skate 3 that can never be as complete as GTA V
No. They took the games, decompiled them into rust, and then mashed the source code together using AI and compiled it into a working game.
What the hell.
What the hell does this mean for the industry, when every software now is open source because decompiling binaries became trivial? Photoshop is open source now so is Adobe just going bankrupt or what?
What do you do as a company working on unreleased software, when you know it’ll be torn apart on day one and made free as soon as it gets out? You’d think the answer is legal protection, but is it really? What happens if 2-3 models down the line your personal agent can just cook up a photoshop on demand?
EVERYTHING is open-source now, and I struggle to really understand the implications of this. I mean, bro — I could literally decompile my banking app and put it inside GTA V if I wanted to. I could have the Skyrim courier deliver my e-mails inside AutoCAD. I could learn duolingo inside my fucking terminal bro.
I think with software becoming trivialized, we’re about to see a great cull of software companies, and centralization of the remaining ones, maybe like how supermarkets swallowed up the corner stores in the past 30 years. Because if the bar for what constitutes “valuable software” keeps rising, then side-projects-gone-side-hustles will struggle to survive. I love you pinboard.in, but I can just make my own in 10 minutes now.
What will end up not being trivialized is things that have to do with physical goods, like pizza delivery or cloud storage, regulatory compliance, and intellectual property. Also, having a large userbase, because users are slow to switch platforms.
Other than that, I think software products are pretty much fucked tho.
But hang on, this isn’t actually the note I wanted to end on.
The cool thing about all this is that I can play Skate 3 in GTA V, I mean hello?
AI allows small companies with not so good IT infrastructure to create complex software integrations that would have been impossible for them just a few years ago, which I think will usher in an era of unprecedented automation and interconnectedness.
There is really no reason for fax machines to exist anymore, but legacy is hard to kill… now you can just tell Claude to “figure it out” and boom an hour later you’re integrated with the austrian identity provider or any other service you need.
You also don’t even have to fully understand all the use cases of your product as you develop it, because if you have MCP integration then your users will find use cases you could have never imagined, and isn’t that an exciting prospect?
The internet has made it so humans are never truly isolated anymore: Whenever you think of someone you can just send them a meme on instagram, or a message on WhatsApp. On Twitter you can get news about an earthquake on the other side of the world pretty much as soon as it happens.
It’s like the internet has allowed humanity to slowly blend into this half organic, half technological superorganism, with our senses and reach extending past the physical world via the digital.
And AI will blend the boundaries between the physical and digital even further, at unprecedented speed and scale, in ways that I don’t think humans comprehend just yet. What is possible once everything is connected to everything else? What is possible when I can do banking inside GTA V, and order pizza in AutoCAD?
Who knows, but these are strange and exciting times ahead for sure.