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MB Marques Brownlee Marques Brownlee Known online as MKBHD, he reviews consumer technology on YouTube: phones, laptops, cameras, and whatever new gadget is launching that week.

“Reverse engineering was one of the hardest and most time-consuming things you could possibly do. And that was sort of the moat that stopped people from even doing it, because it took so many resources and so much time. And now these agents will just run endlessly until they completely decompile everything. People are decompiling every video game ever made and just making them free.”

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“Reverse engineering was one of the hardest and most time-consuming things you could possibly do. And that was sort of the moat that stopped people from even doing it, because it took so many resources and so much time. And now these agents will just run endlessly until they completely decompile everything. People are decompiling every video game ever made and just making them free.” — Marques Brownlee, Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Context

His co-host had just said AI makes it easy to pull secret algorithms out of compiled software. Marques builds on it: the cost of reverse engineering used to be the thing that protected products, and AI agents are removing that cost.

Transcript

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast Around 1:42:41 into the episode
Marques Brownlee

…of like a revolution against these giant companies because we can just strip out all of the that they sell us and make us use without asking and all stuff like that. Very interesting point. Yeah. So I don't know. It's going to be really interesting to see how firmware moves in the future. I think

David Imel

…it in source code and you could sell an app and no one would be able to actually get the algorithm without doing a full reverse engineer. Whereas now I've been seeing a lot of plug-in manufacturers be like the algorithm that gives our audio plug-in a specific sound, Claude can just rip out of the

Marques Brownlee

it's insane. Yeah, it's insane because like reverse engineering was one of the hardest things and most time consuming things you could possibly do. And that was sort of the moat that stopped people from even doing it because it took so many resources and so much time. And now these agents will just run endlessly until they completely decompile everything. People are decompiling every video game ever made and just making them free.

Andrew Manganelli

Because it's, it's, it's,

Marques Brownlee

well, it's legal to reverse engineer things.

David Imel

But it's not clear to just sort of assume that it would take so many hours.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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