Erik Meijer

For fifty years, the software industry has thrived on the fact that code is scarce. Proprietary vendors protect it by keeping the source secret. Open source protects it with licenses that attach obligations to copying.

AI destroys the assumptions underneath both.

A contemporary coding model needs very little to reverse engineer years of human engineering effort. Hand it a binary, an API, an obfuscated bundle, or just enough observed behavior, and it can infer what the system does, recover its structure, and emit a fresh implementation. The result is clean, documented, idiomatic, and has no traceable connection to your "IP." The functionality survives. The provenance doesn't. Trade secrets stop being secret the moment you ship. Copyleft has nothing left to grab onto.

Welcome to the software chop shop. Your software comes in through the back, gets stripped for parts, and leaves with new paint and the VIN filed off.