alt Hacker NewsI've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern.
I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.
In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.
The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.
And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.
The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.
The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
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Speaking as a hardware engineer, the moat did not vanish. You have simply assumed you were on the right side of the moat this whole time when in reality you dug half a trench and threw a glass of water in it.
If your firmware is open for someone to reverse engineer now, it has always been open. The real moat is firmware security, encryption, secure locked down hardware. Nobody, not even LLMs, can reverse your firmware if they can't obtain a cleartext copy of it.
You must use microcontrollers with security features, encrypted firmware, secure key stores. If you don't, you never had a moat in the first place. Your only security is the belief that it's too much effort to reverse your product. Security through obscurity is the moat that has vanished and everyone has been screaming for decades that this is not secure by any stretch of the imagination.
Can't help but feel that AI is the killing of the golden goose. We thought it would kill jobs, but it may just end up killing entire industries.
Intellectual property incentivized many and laid many golden eggs, but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
But who knows, maybe imploding the software industry is a good thing. I may lose my house in the process, but I think we could all get back to touching a little more grass.
Don't worry, you'll be making hardware pedals with webassembly and remote attestation soon enough, and we'll be back to the status quo.
Then you will compete on different things, i guess. For audio hardware, the physicality and experience of using it is important. Have better knobs, better usability, and the best algorithms!
Also, I guess with agents it should be possible to explore new algorithms more efficiently. You may discover something cool! And yes, anyone can copy it, but you will still have first mover advantage. Also, in music tech brands matter a lot. People love getting stuff from small “artisan” companies.
Why don’t you do as much of this as possible for the next six months and make the best product you can.
It sounds like it will go faster if you use coding agents.
Anyone copying you will have to do the same.
Perhaps spend a month with your agent making it harder for other agents to reverse engineer?
That really must be scary. I'd hope at least in the world of music/audiophilia (where gold plates hdmi cables rule) you could focus on the upper ends of the market? Even if the sound is similar you hopefully will have an audience that appreciated the fit and finish and high quality components. Surely will be a challenge but when I see teardowns from China they almost always cheap out with paper caps and such. And while it may be exhausting perhaps you can turn it to your favor (where IP permits) to increase your product range? Godspeed though!
The Chinese were already hacking your firmware if it was worth hacking at all. The only thing that's changed is that now you can, too. What's not to like?
Before the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
After the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
One solution is to encrypt the firmware and keep the decryption keys on the hardware side, preferably in something that’s tamper resistant.
It’s not ideal. It has serious drawbacks. It makes development and updates a PITA. But it does make it much harder to decompile your firmware.
Already for some years. You can now buy decent metal (enclosure) guitar pedal stompboxes for 5 USD… who can produce for that? The only thing that counts is ideas.
No product is now safe. Everything from photoshop to office suite to harvey are being reverse engineered.
Out of curiosity, did you just use vanilla Claude Code with Opus 5.5, or did you use this: https://github.com/morluto/rea?
everybody cloned stuff before. You keep your clients because you offer more than the lowest available price: the human touch (support, design, quality, problem solving)
LLMs only appear to do that, if they do it effectively is because you can.
You should talk to a lawyer. And not post something like this publicly
The only solution is reputation and selling to the public domain, instead of to individuals:
if people like your stuff, you'll have a reputation because of what you made in the past, then you can offer to release your next project to the public domain if some crowdfunding goal is met.
This is interesting. I don't know if this is just cope, but it makes me think of how the schematics of a Soldano SLO100 are readily available. A true feat of engineering. Anyone could build one because the information is out there. Why don't they?
I know that it's much easier to get JLC to make a board and then flash some stolen firmware on it than it is to build a tube amplifier, but musicians are weird creatures.
All I know is, I would rather be in the before times.
Maths are just maths again!
Enough with patents, NDAs and trade secrets.
From "Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062870 :
> Neural Amp Modeler (is open source)
> JUCE on embedded, Rust DSP
> A board of guitar pedals with IDK one USB-A and a USB-C adapter with OSC and MIDI support; USB MIDI trololo pedals
There are multiple products like this on Amazon+Shopify w/ linked inventory now
bro, music people are buying switches - like layer 2 switches - for better audio quality.
But that’s a good thing. Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it. And that means we can make better things.
It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world. I don’t care who reads my source code anymore, code is disposable. It’s expertise that matters now.