Someone gave Claude Code the model number of his parents' TV on October 17. The agent found the set on the home wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher. The sponsored ad that played before anyone could reach Netflix is gone. 404 Media reports the post has been seen more than six million times.

Within two days, TechCrunch found owners of TCL, Sony, Fire TV and LG sets doing the same, plus two open-source projects that package the job up. The same week, people put new software on bricked Lululemon mirrors, stripped the ads out of baby monitors and turned smart picture frames into calendars. A GitHub project called Reverse Engineer Anything, launched October 7, passed 342,000 stars by October 20. Its pitch is a single sentence: "See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA."

The line from the 404 Media piece that will travel is from Mike Nolan, a software architect who studies the political economy of open source: "All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model."

I have spent 15 years in payments, 10 of them deciding what goes in a software plan and what it costs. That quote is wrong, and wrong in a way that matters to anyone who prices a product.

AI has taken the cost of copying a feature to roughly zero. That kills one business: charging rent for a feature and defending the rent with a locked door. It does not touch what customers were paying for underneath.

What the agents are actually ripping out

Start with the inventory. Ads before the home screen. Telemetry. Preloaded apps nobody asked for. A fitness mirror that stopped working when the company behind it moved on. A picture frame whose only sin was being less useful than a calendar. Not one of the viral examples is a person cloning a well-run service they were happy with.

The games tell the same story from the other side. Reversed with AI, a running list of titles decompiled, recompiled or ported with help from Claude and Codex, stood at 143 projects on October 21. Two of the heaviest PlayStation 2 games, Gran Turismo 4 and God of War II, have been statically recompiled to run, partly, inside a Chrome tab. People are not doing this because the games were bad. They are doing it because the hardware that ran them is 20 years old and the publishers stopped caring.

Every one of those devices and discs is a company that treated lock-in as the product. The moment the cost of leaving dropped, the customers left, and they brought an agent with them. That is not the death of a business model. That is the market doing a performance review.

What people were paying for all along

Nobody was ever really paying for the feature. They were paying for what was wrapped around it, and none of that got cheaper this month.

The data. The integrations that took five years of partnership meetings. The person who answers at three in the morning when something fails. The compliance, the audit trail, the fact that when it goes wrong there is a company to shout at. Ben Thompson made a version of this point in February, when the public markets had decided software was finished: "people saying they're going to zero are wrong," he told John Collison, pointing to systems of record like Workday and Stripe Billing as the categories nobody rebuilds in-house. The haircut, in his telling, is on growth, not survival. I would go further: the haircut lands on whichever lines of the pricing page were only ever a feature.

Payments is the cleanest example I know. You can clone a checkout page in an afternoon. I would not be surprised if an agent could clone most of a point-of-sale app in a week. You cannot clone an acquiring relationship, a dispute process, a settlement window or a PCI audit. The feature was never the product. The feature was the door.

I shipped hardware with software on it for years at Clover. The question I would sit with now is simple. Is the reason customers stay something they would choose, or something you built so they could not leave? Only one of those still works. It is the same question buyers are already asking from the other side, as the SaaStr agent ledger showed when 20 agents repriced a software stack that had been sold per human seat.

Whose experience are you hacking

Two different things are happening in this story and they are getting the same applause. One is a person taking back a device they own, or a game they paid for. The other is cloning something that belongs to somebody else and calling it liberation.

The PlayStation scene shows both. Decompiling a PS2 game you bought so it runs in a browser is one thing. The posts celebrating a jailbroken PS5 with the whole library listed as free are another, and Mashable, which looked into the Relapse jailbreak behind the surge, found no confirmation that its developers used AI at all. Then there is the developer who pointed an agent at GoldHEN, a PS4 homebrew tool volunteers have maintained for about five years, published a copy called OpenGoldHEN without asking, and told Kotaku he did not care what the team thought. Kotaku found the AI's own working notes still sitting in the code comments.

That last one is the tell. The reverse-engineering boom is not only a problem for companies selling locked doors. It lands on open-source maintainers too, the people whose work was already free. If the test is "could an agent copy it," everything fails. The test that matters is whose experience you are hacking.

The bill arrives in six months

To be fair to Nolan, his second point is the better one and it got less attention. "There's a lot of work associated with maintaining software," he told 404 Media, "so there may be a lot of instances where the software may not be reliable enough to use."

The vibe-coded launcher looks like an Apple TV today. Ask in six months whether it still boots after a firmware update, who patched the hole an agent left open, and what happened when the parents pressed the wrong button. TechCrunch already found one owner who bricked his Android TV mid-job and another stuck halfway through a Fire TV. Cloning is cheap. Maintenance costs exactly what it cost last year.

The surviving software businesses live in the promise that it will still work on Tuesday, and that someone is accountable if it does not. Reliability was always part of the product. It is about to become most of it.

This is the same unowned risk surface I keep returning to as the MM Liability Gap: when software acts and something breaks, the hard question is never whether it broke but who answers. A clone has no one to answer. That is its price, and it is not printed anywhere. It is also, uncomfortably, the argument Microsoft is making when it resells the same agent technology at a premium: you are paying for the wrapper, and the wrapper is the product.

What I would do this week if I ran a product

Go through your pricing page and mark every line a motivated customer could rebuild with an agent in a week. Be honest. Then ask what you are actually charging for on each of those lines. If the answer is "the feature," you are in the TV launcher business, and you have seen how that ends.

If the answer is trust, data, distribution, uptime or liability, you are fine. Say so, out loud, on the pricing page. Stop pretending the moat is the thing that just became free.

SaaS is not dying. Charging rent for a locked door is dying. Those were never the same business, and the companies that confused them are about to find out.

If an agent can rebuild every feature on your pricing page in a week, which line would your customers still pay for, and have you ever told them that is the one they are buying?

Charlie Major is a Product Development Manager at Mastercard. The views and opinions expressed in Major Matters are his own and do not represent those of Mastercard.