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You will own everything and be happy

Could AI be about to turn the "you will own nothing and be happy" mantra on its head?

We know that there has been a growing move to deprive the rights of ownership from those who purchase products by turning access to much of the intrinsic functionality into a subscription-based service.

Now there's a new move, powered by AI, to take back ownership from the companies who would hide it behind a paywall.

People are starting to vibe-code updates to the firmware in their devices which add long-wanted functionality and give access to features that were previously subscription-based.

A great example of this is shown in this video where camera YouTuber Tony Northrup used vibe-coding to tweak the functions of a popular camera in a way that the manufacturer hadn't considered:

In the case above, Northrup pointed the vibe-coding agent at a Github repository where someone else had already reverse-engineered much of the code but now there are tools coming online that don't even require this.

Enter REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), a tool that can work from raw binaries to analyse the function of code and effectively decompile it to the point where changes can be made from a text-prompt.

Suddenly you not only "own" the computer-based product you bought but you can also modify it, improve it or even completely repurpose it if you have a mind to.

This must be the worst nightmare of companies that so often sell hardware for at or below cost with a view to using this loss-leader to create an ongoing subscription-based revenue stream. Their business model is slowly being dismantled, despite the fact that to reverse-engineer such things could be a breach of the USA's DMCA.

As I have highlighted in a previous column, the power of vibe-coding has also meant that many mainstream software companies are now facing threats from "free" vibe-coded alternatives that embody not only the functionality of their products but also closely mimick their look and feel. Such alternatives have the potential to become a drop-in replacement but without the up-front cost or monthly subscription fees.

Even modern smart TVs are being hacked by AI tools to remove unwanted advertising and bloatware, as described in this story.

To behonest, vibe-coding is becoming so easy that I think it may even replace "free" software.

I say this after spending an entire day trying to get the open source program PeerTube running on a clean install of Linux. What a bloody nightmare that was!

Despite using Docker, which should have made the task super-easy, I had to spend many, many hours tracking down errors in config files and a cascade of errors that propagated through the entire system. Docker is supposed to be an almost shrink-wrap, turnkey install process but it was an utter nightmare to the extent that I had to rely heavily on AI just to negotiate my way around the errors.

I honestly think I would have been better off just to vibe-code a functional equivalent bit of code from scratch, it would have halved the time and I'd have ended up with exactly what I wanted, rather than someone else's idea of what is best.

So, right at the top of the list of things I want for Christmas is a platform capable of running a powerful AI model that will vibe code stuff for me.

Yes, I have Gemma 4 running on my Raspberry Pi 5 but it's only really up to generating code snippets (not full projects) and it's also quite slow; understandable, given the hardware constraints.

Yes, a lovely full-optioned Mac Mini or perhaps an NVIDIA Spark would do nicely, at least for the time being.

However, such things are far beyond my meagre financial resources so I'll just have to make do in the meantime. It'll be a little while before *I* can own stuff and be happy I guess.

Carpe Diem folks!

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