Vibe-coding a Word clone? Your AI prompt could be a legal problem

A month ago, another wall fell to AI. Frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI are now capable of “reverse engineering” popular software like Photoshop and Microsoft Word into free versions. Does that mean you can do it, too, with your own apps?

Not without a lot of time, effort, and tokens. But your legal right to reverse-engineer software hasn’t been tested yet, and experts say you’re pretty much free to experiment as you wish—with some common-sense limitations.

By now, most people are at least familiar with ChatGPT and Claude, and have tried them out with basic questions, chats, and tasks. Software developers who use such models for agentic coding report that they’ve become more like project managers than coders. And now, instead of coding their own personal apps, they’re getting AI to do it for them. In fact, that’s usually what happens when I ask friends what they’re vibe-coding for: either some hyper-specific personal utility, or replicating paid services.