One-Shot Reverse Engineering: The Moat Question
A developer reported on Hacker News decompiling three competitor products in 72 hours using Claude Opus 5.5—including the Strymon Big Sky, an award-winning hardware effects processor. One prompt. Three hours.
The method: Claude wrote an emulator for the original firmware, then translated it to independent C++ with 100% native-level replication. Along the way, Claude discovered and incorporated a reverse-engineering project someone had uploaded to GitHub a week earlier.
This raises an immediate question: What competitive moat remains for hardware and low-level software companies when reverse engineering costs nearly nothing?
The answer probably involves speed to market, ecosystem lock-in, and trust. But the window for those advantages may be closing faster than anyone expected.