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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.
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The moat for audio effects but especially guitar effects has never been just the quality of algorithm. Yes I know you and the teams at companies like Strymon and Universal Audio and whatnot have slaved over getting every detail right. But what makes Strymon the go to choice for so many players isn't just the sound you can get out of it. Because you can get those sounds elsewhere now. The moat a physical pro audio product is its interface and its branding. And I know that's tough to hear especially if you're an engineer but its true. People buy Strymon pedals because they know exactly what they're getting and they know its going to be in a format where if you want to dial in a tone without getting into the weeds of menus you can (but if you need to advanced features you can also do that). If people wanted the cheapest way to get those sounds, they could always hook up to a live VST host rig. But you get Strymon because you know that brand name and you know you're going to get a box that you can twiddle the dials on the floor and yes you are also getting that as close to perfect algorithm as well. The sound is part of Strymon's branding but it isn't all of their branding. Look at it this way, pretty much every original circuit design in the analog guitar pedal space has been copied, duplicated, sold for pennies on the dollar, modified, whatever. But those companies still exist and do well because their moat has never been the circuit, its the branding. Anyway, I hope you find some peace in the next few days. Its hard to argue that your moat hasn't shrunk and maybe you're in the process of building up that customer base. You gotta think about the copycats and it sucks, but you always had to do that. Its just harder now.
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.
I'm guessing the Lexicon was mine: https://github.com/joelanders/reflecticon-224 It was a fun project because it predates DSP chips by a couple years (1978). So there's an 8080 host driving some DSP boards made out of 7400 series chips. Bio of the designer with a photo of him prototyping it: https://www.davidgriesinger.com/biographies/ I haven't written it up yet, that part is still hard :) I paid someone on Upwork to trace the schematics into KiCad. Had LLM agents turn those into Verilog models. Lots of little mistakes had to be found and fixed at this point, it took months... It seems like agents are a lot better at transcribing and grokking schematics now compared to 6 months ago, so it might be much easier now. Agree that consequences for the future seem depressing...
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.
I hope your post history doesn't link back to your company or real identity because you probably violated some TOS and I'm not sure it's smart to name your competitors and openly admit you're thinking about repackaging the code you just stole from them. I don't care either way but depending on where you live this might get you in trouble