The Great Software Devaluation: AI Slop Comes for the Big Boys

First Adobe. Then Microsoft. Now Autodesk. AI is eroding the economics of proprietary software, and the whole thing is getting wonderfully absurd.

Well, this escalated quickly.. Between September 30 and October 7, 2026, a developer used AI to recreate seven of Adobe's major applications and released them as open source.

Photoshop. Illustrator. Premiere Pro. Lightroom. After Effects. InDesign. Acrobat.

Free.

No Creative Cloud subscription. No annual licensing commitment. No cancellation process requiring a lawyer, a therapist, and three increasingly hostile conversations with customer service.

The project, called ArtCraft, was created by developer Brandon Thomas using Anthropic's Claude. And apparently, seven Adobe applications weren't enough. He moved on to Microsoft. WordCraft. GridCraft. DeckCraft….Word. Excel. PowerPoint.

Then came CADCraft, taking aim at Autodesk-style functionality, and SoundCraft, targeting professional audio software. And where are all these wonderful little open-source alternatives being distributed?

GitHub. You know, GitHub.

The company Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft is now hosting open-source alternatives to its own flagship software products on infrastructure it owns.

You really couldn't write this stuff. Well, apparently, AI could.

The Moat Is Getting Awfully Shallow

Let's be clear. These aren't fully mature replacements for Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, or AutoCAD. They're early-stage applications, with plenty of missing features, compatibility issues, and the usual growing pains.

But that's not the story.

The story is what happens to the economic value of proprietary software when reproducing useful portions of its functionality becomes dramatically cheaper. For decades, companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk built extraordinarily valuable software empires. Their products were sophisticated, difficult to recreate, and deeply embedded in professional workflows. That difficulty was part of the moat. And AI is making the moat considerably easier to cross.

We were exploring this in The SaaS Reckoning, where the economics of building software versus buying it were already beginning to change.

But now the pressure is coming from another direction. Not only can AI help companies build alternatives to expensive software, but those alternatives can be released publicly, improved collaboratively, and distributed for free. And they don't necessarily have to reproduce every feature of the original.

Most people don't use all of Photoshop. Most businesses don't use all of Salesforce. They need specific capabilities. And when those capabilities become inexpensive to recreate, the pricing power of the original product starts getting interesting. Microsoft's data centers, land, and compute infrastructure still have enormous economic value. But the scarcity that helped make its proprietary applications so valuable is becoming harder to defend. That doesn't mean Office is suddenly worthless. It means some of the assumptions supporting its value are changing.

And Then They Made the Software Agent-Ready

Here's the part I find particularly interesting. Some of these applications aren't just being recreated as conventional software. They're being designed to work directly with AI agents.

DeckCraft, for example, exposes functionality through a command-line interface and MCP, the Model Context Protocol.

CADCraft follows a similar approach. Instead of requiring a human to open an application, navigate menus, learn its interface, and perform a series of operations, an AI agent can directly invoke the capabilities it needs.

That's gold. Microsoft spent decades perfecting the Office ribbon interface. These developers are making the ribbon optional. And that brings us right back to our conversations about polymorphic software and the polymorphic OS. The application becomes less important than the capability it provides. The agent becomes the interface. Microsoft and Google are both developing their own agent infrastructure, so they're hardly unaware of the transition. But Microsoft has an interesting problem.

How aggressively do you make Office unnecessary when Office is one of the things you're selling?

An open-source developer doesn't have that conflict. Build the capability. Make it agent-accessible. Give it away.

Next.

And Now There's a Boycott. Because Of Course There Is.

As if the software industry wasn't having an interesting enough time, a TikTok creator calling himself The Natom has started promoting something called the Great Pirating Boycott.

His proposal is to use AI to recreate commercial software and distribute free alternatives, encouraging people to stop financially supporting companies they oppose. He's even trying to connect the movement to companies he associates with the Epstein files. Now, being mentioned in those documents doesn't establish wrongdoing, and independently developing open-source software isn't the same thing as pirating proprietary code. And a viral TikTok certainly doesn't establish that a coordinated boycott is actually hurting anyone's revenue.

But the underlying development is fascinating.

The same AI capabilities that are making commercial software easier to compete with can now be deliberately directed toward challenging particular companies for social, political, or economic reasons. Microsoft and Adobe already have to deal with the technological disruption.

Now people are talking about turning that disruption into a protest movement.

Apparently, the AI slop has unionized. And that's a dimension of AI disruption we probably haven't been discussing enough.

We're always talking about Skynet, existential threats, and catastrophic scenarios.

Meanwhile, in the real world, people are using AI to challenge medical bills, build competing products, undermine subscription models, and organize economic pressure. AI capability cuts every direction. The technology doesn't particularly care whether you're using it to build a billion-dollar company or make life difficult for one. And that may produce some of the most unpredictable consequences of this entire transition.

The Big Boys Have a New Problem

So, within a matter of days, we've watched AI-assisted open-source development expand from Adobe to Microsoft and other major software categories. Some of those alternatives are being built specifically for agentic computing. A prominent investor, Chamath Palihapitiya, has publicly argued that traditional software intellectual property is losing its economic value. And now a viral campaign is encouraging people to use the same technology as an economic weapon against corporations. None of this means Microsoft, Adobe, or Autodesk disappears tomorrow. They still have enormous advantages in engineering, support, enterprise relationships, compatibility, and distribution. But the economics protecting their software businesses are changing.

The cost of creating alternatives is falling. The ability to distribute them is expanding. And agents are making the traditional application interface increasingly optional. That's a pretty uncomfortable combination for companies whose valuations depend, in part, on proprietary software remaining difficult to replace.

For decades, the software industry built its fortunes around controlling access to capabilities. Now AI is making those capabilities easier to recreate, share, and operate independently. nd the truly ridiculous part?

Microsoft owns the platform where people are publishing open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office.

The software moat isn't gone. But somebody's apparently handing out shovels. And they're available on GitHub.

Please do not resist.

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Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.