I'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.

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.

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.

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.

Reverse engineering of audio effects can be done completely independently of the hardware that generates it.

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.

Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.

You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".

> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours

When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.

The technology is powerful enough that it was bound to happen regardless. If it didn't happen here in the US, it would have happened somewhere that IP laws aren't respected.

That's an age-old rationalization for everything.

it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)

> 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?

I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.

I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.

That's a nice vision but if AI and robots end up replacing most jobs then we're first going to suffer a total collapse in living standards across the world, until we replace capitalism at least. When the economy no longer relies on labour people won't have anything to trade in exchange for basic necessities.

You only have to look at the current situation in China to see that the problem is not capitalism, or communism, at least not by itself:

https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941

https://www.economist.com/china/2019/11/14/homelessness-has-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si2zT-wCs3c

We all know that "real" communist societies like North Korea are worse, much, much worse. In fact within China how bad this is varies enormously. If you're in a "rope village" somewhere deep inland, having the finest house in the entire city is arguably worse than homelessness in Beijing, but the party won't let you leave except as homeless, because you're allocated a "Household" (Hukou) and you aren't allowed to leave.

And, of course, half the problem is the very structure of the communist party itself: local officials hide the problem, because if they don't, they'll be purged or at the very least won't see promotions, ever. Which means that the police will be using violence to hide the problem rather than fix it.

AI can provide incredible wealth, or immeasurable misery, in both capitalist and communist societies. That is not what makes the difference, that is just how political parties like to frame themselves and so the argument why you should choose "left" or "right".

Capitalism and private home ownership can certainly provide housing, but if you go too far or not far enough in private ownership and "protecting capital" they won't. And communism can certainly fix homelessness (the Soviets did, for example), except nowadays they just won't.

AI will provide more tools for people with capital, which primarily will be the government. Whether that solves, say, homelessness is a choice, in either system.

You missed the point and went on a tangent about random countries today.

I don't claim to have a solution for what comes after but it is certain that capitalism will collapse if we ever see significant job loss due to AI and robotics.

This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.

Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.

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.

Do you think Chinese manufactures can't clone the hardware? Do you think they can't provide a premium product/experience? They most certainly can and do.

Just be different. Just create a brand. Oh if only it were that easy!

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.

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!

I guess patents are becoming more important now ... :(

They never weren't important. What's important now is being prepared to act on them, which is expensive.

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.

A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.

I agree it’s not great, and finding an MCU that does this well is challenging. But that may just become a hardware design constraint going forward.

It’s not clear to me what else one can do to protect this kind of IP if you want or need to do the processing on-device.

Even so, if you can manage to get a agent into the loop of "change variable > inspect results > do change > repeat", you can replicate everything from server-side game servers to audio effects, as long as you manage to get the data into a format they can either "visually" inspect, or inspect by data. For audio, I've had success replicating synth sounds and effects by giving them MIDI access to analog hardware, spectrograms and a suite of other unix tools.

The tricky part is figuring out the workflow, once that's in place, you can encrypt the protocol itself as much as you want, the output (audio, video, JSON, whatever) has to go somewhere, and that can be captured and replicated.

Or just ask Claude what is the best way to protect your IP. It should know its capabilities.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of Opus or whatever Anthropic has just eliminates these capabilities. I mean, we got DMCA shoved down our throats. What's stopping them from doing something similar again, I mean, we have a 70 or 70+ year copyright laws now, lol!

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

Imagine if your comment is part of Exhibit A in a lawsuit.

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.

Maths are just maths again!

Enough with patents, NDAs and trade secrets.

Seems "information wants to be free" wins yet again. To bad we don't have any strong political leaders in the world that could run on such platform, I guess in 2-3 decades the tide will start turning the other way again.

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.

you're confusing musicians with "audiophiles"

Someone please do "smart" TVs. You have the chance to remove ads and botnets ("residential proxies") from millions of devices.

They’re really locked down now because of people removing their spyware. Encrypted hardware, signed software.

If someone can do it I’d appreciate it, but it won’t be easy. Their whole business is spying on you.

I’m doing headphones … the cheapish Chinese white box ones….

I was hoping someone would do color printers inkjet and laser.

It's time to hack into my solar inverter...

In a legal fight of printers VS AI behemoths, my money is on the ruthless printer mafia.

You can do this with a DNS gateway in your home running on something like a Raspberry Pi. Check out AdGuard

How do you do this with XFinity? They no longer allow you set your own DNS servers "for better security".

If it's set on your router, can they block that? Assuming you aren't using the router they provide.

I do that, but it would be nice to have a single device/remote and faster UI.

I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.

The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.

If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.

I've had some luck with this too. Every device you buy wants you install an app on your phone. Not if I can help it.

Wish I could release the apps I've "made", but worry about DMCA

Just release it under a pseudonym. The worst they will do is force it off GitHub! Don't redistribute the firmware files if you're really concerned. I am also sort of struggling with this idea so I get where you're coming from.

As an aside: I tried using claude to write GTK4 applications in december 2025/january 2026 and it was awful at it, barely even helpful. Then in September it's writing great gtk4 apps with barely any prompting.

The capability ceiling of models in general has risen massively in not even one year. Back in 2025, I also found them to generally be a net-negative expense of time and effort. I wouldn't universally make the same claim today.

Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole. I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it. Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.

Soon: "Hi Claude, can you translate iOS so it runs in a sandbox on Linux?"

Or: "Can you turn this tablet I got from AliExpress into an iPad?"

It's going to be interesting to watch the big companies struggle with this.

Software is in the same boat. Licenses and obfuscation never really protected anything - it was just too much work/effort to copy. Now it's one prompt..

How timely, I just now pointed Claude at my work laptops MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.

Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?

Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]

Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.

No more excuses.

[0] https://github.com/nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-watch-companion-pair-...

Not that simple but yes, even as a decades long "macOSX" fan I would love to see the Mac finally unshackled. Maybe Apple hardware could become a bit more like the Apple II era again after all? Asahi up to latest hardware generation; fully reverse engineered drivers down to the Metal... it would be a dream.

Because with enough time "the market" reverse engineers everything that has mainstream adoption, but only you are going to reverse engineer something that only you care about

Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.

Except the ones that were brought up the last time you posted this not even a week ago?