Software Is Over - WAN Show October 9, 2026

AI-assisted cloning and PS5 translation now produce convincing prototypes of proprietary software and console systems, so proprietary vendors face stronger competitive pressure [25:05]. The evidence supports pressure on proprietary software, not literal obsolescence of software itself [38:55].

Key topics

• AI-assisted cloning — Photon Studio and ArtCraft are AI-assisted clones rather than true decompilations, with Photon built using GPT-6 and Claude tooling for about $2,000, roughly seven years of Photoshop subscriptions [23:55]. Both include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat alternatives in Rust and WebAssembly, but remain super-early alpha with incomplete PSD compatibility and weak professional reliability [25:05].

• PS5 emulation — Kite and AnyPS5 represent a translation-layer approach rather than a full console clone, with Kite showing about half of 300 tested titles booting to controllable, not necessarily bug-free or completable, gameplay [38:45]. AnyPS5 reports 100% coverage of 1,166 PS5 GPU shader instructions and about 85% of system libraries, and has run Dreaming Sarah at a stable 60fps on a GTX 1050 Ti and Core i5-7500 [40:21].

• Local AI hardware — Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and Nvidia’s Spark N1X sell local LLM and agent workloads, starting at $2,600 for 18 CPU cores, 5,120 CUDA cores, and 24GB unified memory, up to $6,000 for 128GB [44:34]. The stated route is Windows on ARM, x86 translation through Prism, and LLM routing between local models and cloud models [46:16]. The hosts question whether the market extends beyond early adopters [48:43].

• AI slop — Google’s open-source vulnerability reward program suspended product submissions until at least 2027 because low-effort AI-generated reports flooded engineering and maintainer workflows, while Intel reportedly suspended its bug bounty for similar reasons [57:25]. The Linux kernel group reported similar overload after new releases, showing that generated bug reports are now an operational tax on open-source security teams, not just a theoretical concern [57:23].