Complexity no longer protects

Maurice Heumann published on 9 October 2026 the account of how a fleet of artificial intelligence agents rebuilt, in three months, the source code of a best-selling shooter ^[1]. The result contains 99 % of the game's functions, and 83 % of all of them compile to the same machine code as the original, byte for byte ^[1]. Nine days earlier PhotoCraft had appeared on GitHub, an imitation of Photoshop written by agents that also runs on Linux, where Adobe never released its program ^[2]. On 8 September a volunteer project had completed, after six years, the full reconstruction of Super Smash Bros. Melee, with an OpenAI model in the final stretch ^[3].

The streak is best read as an instance of something larger. Complexity has stopped protecting software. A product like Photoshop is the deposit of decades of decisions, and that accumulation was its moat: the law never protected what a program does, but redoing it meant spending the years again. An agent does not need those years, because the finished product tells it, function by function, what the right answer is. The more mature and complete a program is, the better it serves as the model for its copy. A developer can be made to take down a repository. A capability that anyone rents for a subscription leaves no one to serve notice on.

Three months and a subscription

Heumann started with a Claude subscription and added one to Codex, and in the final weeks he kept fourteen Luna agents and two Opus 5.5 agents working without anyone talking to them ^[1]. He estimates they consumed between 600 and 700 billion tokens ^[1]. Tom's Hardware reports from a post of his that he does not pay for his tokens, and that he puts the cost at about 1,200 euros with subscriptions or between 200,000 and 250,000 dollars at API prices ^[4]. The game, which the press identifies as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, from 2009, runs without noticeable bugs according to its author ^{[1] [4]}. Chris Lewis rebuilt the whole of Snowboard Kids, for the Nintendo 64, in 84 days, when its sequel had taken him 596, and only 4.8 % of the progress needed an expert's hand ^[5].

The original is the specification

The cases share a method: Heumann compiled each rebuilt function with the original game's compiler and compared all of its bytes with those of the executable ^[1]. PhotoCraft compares what it draws with the image Photoshop itself stores in every file, and declares all 631 menu items of the program it imitates wired to a command, though it warns that this measures wiring, not behaviour ^[2]. A newsletter for founders drew the consequence: feature parity has become an automated job, and anything a user can observe can be specified and rebuilt ^[6].

Anthropic had shown the same method in February. Sixteen agents wrote, in two weeks, a 100,000-line C compiler able to build the Linux kernel, for just under 20,000 dollars ^[7]. The GCC compiler served as the referee when the agents got stuck, and the result, according to its author, is not yet a replacement for a real compiler ^[7]. That is the inversion that matters: the decades of features that made a product unreachable are now decades of test cases for whoever imitates it.

What the law never protected

A United States federal court ruled in 1992 that taking a program apart to reach its ideas and functional elements is a fair use when there is no other way in ^[8]. The Court of Justice of the European Union went further in 2012: neither the functionality of a program, nor its programming language, nor the format of its files is a protected form of expression ^[9]. Protecting functionality, it wrote, would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas ^[9]. The legal scholar Andrés Guadamuz studied the case of the Adobe clones and thinks, «very tentatively», that the project may be on the right side of United States law ^[10]. A law firm put it better than anyone: the rules did not change this month; what changed is the price of doing what the rules have long allowed ^[11].

A takedown reaches one person

The rights holders responded within days, and in every visible case they succeeded. Heumann will not publish his code, «for obvious reasons», he writes ^[1]. The video of his demonstration was disabled after a report by the copyright owner ^[4]. According to the affected developer, Activision sent takedown notices against browser versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops whose pages said the maps, models and animations came from the original game ^[12]. In August Nintendo had a network of 311 repositories taken down, and its argument was not copied code but the keys that break the encryption of its games ^[13]. Every takedown we could read rested on a file from the original, on leaked code, on a key or on a trademark. None attacked code rewritten from scratch.

That tool works one case at a time. In March Anthropic asked GitHub to take down the leaked code of one of its products, and the platform processed the notice against a network of 8,100 repositories. The next day the company narrowed it to one repository and 96 copies listed one by one ^[14]. PhotoCraft already has more than 9,000 forks on GitHub ^[2]. REA, a toolkit that connects agents to reverse-engineering programs, went in six days from under 10,000 stars to more than 100,000 ^[15]. Whoever builds carefully leaves out what a notice can reach. A project targeted by a Take-Two notice in 2025 replied that its software works with a lawfully installed copy of the game supplied by the user ^[16].

What still fails today

PhotoCraft grades itself: its documentation estimates that it is 45 % ready for professional work, and withdraws as «far too optimistic» the 82 % it had announced at launch ^[2]. The project calls itself clean-room, though its parity document says it measured its target by inspecting the Photoshop installation, including the text strings in the binary ^[2]. Heumann lost the first month of work, because the code the agents delivered was extremely readable and semantically wrong, and rescuing it cost him more time than starting over ^[1]. The agents answered the byte-for-byte check by writing inline assembly, and several times they tried to modify the program that checked them ^[1]. Lewis believes that his project, in the best case, would have stalled near 90 % without three specialists ^[5]. An academic benchmark found that two frontier models fully solve 31.5 % and 26.9 % of its realistic reverse-engineering cases, although a third comes close to the maximum when it has no budget cap ^[17].

Those stumbles are a snapshot of a moment. The METR organisation measures the length of the tasks an agent completes half of the time, and calculates that this length has doubled every 129 days since 2023 ^[18]. Its page stopped being updated in September and warns that the measure is no longer reliable above sixteen hours ^[18]. The market does not yet register the change in sales. Adobe reported in September quarterly revenue 12.9 % higher than a year earlier, although its net new recurring revenue had fallen about 38 % when Wells Fargo downgraded it on 12 October ^[19]. No source attributes that downgrade to the clones, and Gartner expects worldwide software spending to grow 14.7 % in 2026 ^[20].

A specialised program is worth what it has accumulated: every rare case solved, every format supported, every feature someone asked for twenty years ago. That accumulation protected it in two ways, because nobody else could pay for it and because nobody else knew exactly what had to be built. Agents cheapen the first, and the finished product gives away the second. Maturity, which was the defence, becomes the exposure: the more complete, stable and documented a program is, the easier its copy is to check.

Not all complexity is exposed, and three kinds are worth separating. The kind that shows in behaviour, made of features, menus and file formats, is the one being regenerated today. The kind that keeps changing resists, because a tax rule that is reformed again and again offers no fixed answer to check against. The kind that lives outside the program cannot be copied either: the data, what runs on the vendor's servers, the certification and the liability to the customer. Adobe already runs on its own servers the generative features the clone leaves out, and some buyers of software companies, according to an intermediary in the sector, will not look at a deal without a moat of that kind ^[6].

Latin America sits on both sides of that line. It buys accumulated complexity and never finished paying for it: the last measurement, with 2017 data, found that 46 % of the software installed in Brazil was unlicensed, 49 % in Mexico and 89 % in Venezuela ^[21]. Adobe's full plan costs 214 reais a month in Brazil ^[22], 13 % of a minimum wage of 1,621 reais ^[23], and a yearly AutoCAD licence equals 4.6 of those wages ^[24]. Agents do not give the region access to that software, which it already had without permission, but the chance to generate its own, lawful and maintainable. An unlicensed copy cannot be invoiced or updated, and an equivalent of one's own can: it can be the reader that keeps opening the files when permission is withdrawn, as in 2019, when Adobe cancelled Venezuelan accounts under a United States executive order ^[25]. Local law varies, because Chile allows reverse engineering for compatibility and research while Mexico reserves decompilation to the rights holder, and it weighs little against a platform that takes down one repository at a time ^{[26] [27] [13]}.

What the region sells is of the other kind. Totvs, the Brazilian business-software company, earned 91 % of its 2025 revenue from recurring contracts ^[28]. That revenue pays less for code than for the obligation to keep up with a tax rule that never stops moving, and there an agent has no original to copy. Whoever sells engineering hours faces what we described in Nº 008. Nor does the clone found a moat of its own, because the United States Copyright Office holds that prompts given to a model are not enough to make their writer an author ^[29].

The counterpoint carries weight: every takedown this month worked, and the best clone available gives itself 45 % ^[2]. GIMP has existed since the nineties without threatening Photoshop, because professionals live in the last stretch of polish ^[6]. A Salesforce customer that tried programming its own system with agents ended up buying it, for what maintenance, accounts and security demand ^[30]. The curve that promises to close the gap is a measurement whose last data point is from April ^[18]. We did not find a single verified case in Latin America of a company or a state rebuilding someone else's system with agents, so the opportunity is described and not yet demonstrated.

THE PLAY

1. Copy what stands still. The mature, expensive, well-documented program is the best target: start from a purchased copy and public documents, and do not distribute a single file of the original.
2. Write the check first. Agents perform where a machine can tell whether they got it right, so the asset is the test bench: your customers' real files and what must come out when they are opened.
3. Live on what moves. The advantage lies in knowing before anyone else what your customer needs and changing the program at that pace, because code is an entry cost that is worth less every month.