Reverse-engineering was seen as a challenging hobby where people would deeply collaborate to decipher machine language. People got to know each other pretty well like they were good neighbors thanks to the process. Questions would get asked about patterns people couldn’t resolve on their own which gave opportunities for others to pitch in or relay knowledge. A network would get established.

Now a vibecoded tool gets introduced and it eliminates both the challenge and the need to collaborate. There’s no longer any bragging rights, learning hand-in-hand, pride in completing a project started months ago, nor competition to see how fast someone can complete a project. A tool is now available to all and does the work for them.

To your point, there’s no reason the introduction of the new tools won’t bring people together. The reverse-engineering communities will probably undergo an identity crisis with an exodus of participants and the creation of a new type of challenge. Those who were in it for collaborative work will probably leave and not return. Those who just enjoyed witnessing the end results might stay to discuss and learn from what the tools produce. The discussion content would be different and may draw in a completely different crowd.

I mean, if the introduction of Excel made accounting less tedious by completing previously-manual actions and somehow resulted in a massive global community which holds an annual competition for complex workbook design, then perhaps reverse engineering communities won’t vanish overnight as feared. Time will tell.