[PaulRobinson]

The mild alarm for me is that this won't be limited to just games.

I've spent almost 30 years building applications for the web. I've been switching my attention to different models of distribution in part because I see a desire for people to not be paying monthly seat subscriptions, but also because it can simplify my own operations - I want to move to a solo indie dev model, and giving you an executable you run means you look after "operations", and I don't. Desktop applications in particular have the potential for you to integrate them with your agent workflows.

But if I put effort into building some secret sauce into an application, and there is then a risk that by distributing it, it gets reverse engineered and then rebuilt by competitors, malicious actors, whoever, there is now the same economic risk to software distribution as there is to DRM-free media distribution. As a result, I might just not do it.

Now, some people will argue software wants to be free - build on the F/LOSS economic model, this becomes less of an issue - but there isn't really a viable F/LOSS economic model for most developers.

Per seat monthly subscriptions with remote access seems like the way we need to be, then...

[tyingq]

One area I think is really going to get slaughtered by LLMs are marketplace plugins. Those monthly fee plugins people release for things like Jira, Shopify, Salesforce, etc. There's a subset of those that don't have some backend that's hard to replicate, and asking an LLM to reverse engineer and make your own plugin is trivial.

[xpct]

I can see it both ways. Paying 5 bucks for an add-on that's reputable and not having to think about it again may be preferable to shipping your own. It's not evident to me that one-shot-esque LLM programs will ever work as expected, since they're limited by the amount you have to specify, and then maintain as new issues arise. It's the type of work that a lot of people will be unwilling to put in.

That said, I also think that public reviews will start getting recalibrated by the users themselves. People will start noticing that programs are unreliable or lack features which are seemingly simple to implement with an LLM. The quality of an app may very well depend on how hard it is to replicate, otherwise, why not ship your own?

[RussianCow]

> asking an LLM to reverse engineer and make your own plugin is trivial.

If you already have engineers on staff, a few tens (or even hundreds) of dollars per month per plugin is likely a rounding error budget-wise. If you don't have your own engineers, you're probably not going to be able to produce something as good (reliable, well thought out, etc) as a commercial offering.

I had the same gut reaction as you, but the reality is much more subtle. We work with several clients who are bought into at least one of these ecosystems, and there's no way the math ever works out in favor of building an in-house solution.

[lukasco]

This is the big question! Is it really sensible to distribute locally running software at all? Maybe this leads to the locked down Mac App Store (and Windows I'm sure)? Apple's been wanting to lock down the Mac for ages, and this might be what makes people accept it.