In this week’s newsletter, I wrote a longish essay about the latest AI disruption – proprietary software is being reverse-engineered – and what this means for our jobs and careers. I also recap what I shared this week about using Claude for motion graphics, building a Tailgating Simulator, writing prompts with minimal effort, my attempts at making cartoon versions of myself, and two major companies that are going bankrupt due to AI.
Weekly Recap
You can direct motion graphics now! I designed ten slides for an upcoming NTU Alumni workshop (“AI and Problem Solving”) and I asked Claude to animate them. The result is simple and stunning. I dare anyone to call my video AI slop.
The Tailgating Simulator. I designed this app in Gemini after observing a road bully on Singapore roads. These bullies aren’t good at calculating probabilities nor do they care.
How to write prompts with minimal effort and maximum returns.
Google launched the Gemini 4 Argon model and I used it to make an app that could animate a roundish cartoon of me.
However, I much prefer using this ChatGPT skill I designed to generate nicer-looking cartoon visuals of me.
A glimpse at the fun exercises I design for my workshops.
This is a great visual explainer from The New York Times on how many calculations it takes to train AI models. It sounds geeky but it’s not.
Two major AI-related bankruptcy filings this week. One made me sad, the other made me cheer.
Excerpts from Andrej Karpathy’s X post on the gap in shared understanding of LLM capabilities.
Chinese sayings on my office wall.
More ramblings about my Philosophy of AI.
Sunday Essay
In the past few weeks, something massive was unlocked by Gen AI enthusiasts – proprietary software. If you didn’t know, the major apps from the Adobe Creative Suite (such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro) have been reversed-engineered and recompiled as free versions. Obviously the free apps don’t work perfectly but it’s early days.
Previously, people building Photoshop clones had to build the software from scratch. Today, you can point a frontier AI model at an app, and say, “Reverse engineer this and remake it. And oh, add these customisations.”
This has already been happening in the gaming world. PlayStation exclusives such as God of War 3 Remastered have been recompiled to work on the PC, and provide much better quality visuals than the original PS4 could muster. Smelling massive disruption on the horizon, Xbox has decided to embrace this remixing, but I think Sony’s and Nintendo’s lawyers are going to be very busy.
What does this mean for us non-game developers?
If your job task can be codified – if the process can be written down on paper or demonstrated on a device screen – it can be reverse-engineered by AI.
That’s also how we often learn new skills as humans: We observe how people do things, we study the outcome, then we reverse-engineer the steps so we can repeat them ourselves. I make nice PPT slides because I have seen many good and lousy decks over the past 30 years, and I keep improving by looking at Canva slide templates. I learned photography by shadowing senior photogs and poring over thousands of wire service images. I learned how to teach better by observing great teachers offline and online.
The impact of this AI reverse engineering has not dawned on most people yet, but we will see its repercussions in the next two years. On one hand, it will decimate the moat of traditional software companies and will spark many legal tussles. On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping an individual from creating a free photo-editing app that has only the five functions that they ever use in Photoshop (for me, it’s cropping, auto level, auto contrast, saturation and exposure curve).
Who will survive? Those who can offer a combination of valuable services at a reasonable price for the masses.
For example, I pay S$18 a month to Canva because I find its tools and image library really useful for creating social media posts and for editing AI-generated images. Canva also offers the free Affinity Suite that mimics the Adobe Suite, and the S$18 subscription unlocks AI capabilities in Affinity apps. That’s great value to me. Even if people reverse engineer Canva’s main tools, they cannot reverse engineer its millions of templates, visuals and fonts.
Adobe is the industry standard, but it has priced out the average Joe a long time ago. There’s Adobe Express, but you don’t hear anyone talking about it because Adobe has not marketed it properly in years. The average Joe is happy with free mobile apps to touch up their photos and videos and doesn’t care much for Adobe. Even hardcore video creators can use the free DaVinci Resolve for 4K editing, there’s no need for Premiere Pro.
If you’ve read to this point, and if you map this software disruption to yourself and your job, what will you realise?
Do you have multiple skills you can use in different scenarios?
Can you combine your skills and experience in unique ways to meet the needs of today (and not 2016)?
Do you discard skills that are no longer useful? Or do you harp on the past when those skills were needed?
Are you able to reverse engineer someone else’s skills and unlock them for yourself?
Are you providing undisputed and hard-to-assail value for the salary that you earn?
I know that most of what I say often falls on deaf ears, because most people want to preserve their status quo.
But for those of you who understand, come, let’s run fast together!