AI Agents Turn Ordinary Users Into Hackers
Ben Thompson says building your own tools beats waiting for Apple, and points to a future where the limit is imagination.
Stratechery · Apple and a Hacker’s Future | Stratechery by Ben ThompsonBen Thompson, the writer behind Stratechery, was explaining why Apple's expected home devices left him cold. He said he was tired after years of letdowns from Siri and bristled at bringing Apple's constraints into more of his life.
He was more excited by a different way of getting software. With AI, he said, users can take apart existing programs and rebuild them for their own purposes.
He pointed to games that have lately been broken down to readable code and moved to whatever platform a user wants.
That kind of do-it-yourself power, he argued, beats waiting for the right official feature from Apple and hoping outside developers build it well.
Thompson's line was this: once you embrace building and rebuilding software with AI agents, "a walled garden feels less like protection and more like a prison."
A walled garden here means a computer where the maker tightly controls what programs can do.
To explain why that matters, Thompson reached back to a 2005 essay by Paul Graham called Return of the Mac. Graham had argued that hackers were returning to the Mac because it paired good design with Unix, a flexible foundation for building things.
By hacker, Graham means someone who builds their own software and tools, not a criminal. Graham's larger point, Thompson said, was that hackers are few but disproportionately influential. Graham wrote, "what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in 10 years."
The change with AI agents, Thompson argued, is that "they make anyone a hacker." Thompson's version was that anyone with the will and ideas can now do anything, including writing software that interacts with an agent the way they want.
Thompson was careful about the limit. He said he was not predicting Apple's downfall, and not giving up his Mac or phone. But he had already bought a server running Linux, an open system users can modify more freely, and Thompson said, "I will never put a Mac in a rack again."
The question he ended with was whether what Apple's computers were designed for fits the future he sees coming, where the limit is his own imagination building for himself.
Questions people ask
What does it mean to decompile a game?
To decompile means to work backward from a finished program to something close to its original readable code. AI is useful here because it can help make sense of messy machine instructions, suggest readable names, and help rewrite the result for another device.
What is the difference between a walled garden and an open system?
A walled garden is a system where one company controls the store, the rules, and what programs are allowed to do. A more open system lets users install almost anything and change deeper settings, but also leaves more room for mistakes and malware.