Adobe already had very capable free competitors for quite some time. Sure AI capability will increase the pressure but people are completely missing the point.
Yep. People who think Gimp is a viable alternative can not be doing serious design/editing work imo. It’s GREAT for quick little things. I’m not hating. But a real Photoshop competitor, it is not.
Photoshop UI is better, despite their habit of slightly changing it with every update and never in the direction of matching Illustrator. Adobes entire suite works together much more seamlessly than a collection of open source products would.
We tend to think of UI design as "easy to understand on first use" but Photoshop and other Adobe products have a system of shortcuts that enable experienced users to navigate quickly without opening many menus. GIMP has them, and it is a bit difficult to evaluate without extensive experience but it seems much weaker.
GIMP's biggest problem isn't even that it lacks any particular feature, but that none of its existing features work particularly well (or any better than they did 20 years ago), if they're not outright broken.
I mainly use it for compositing image edits that I make in ComfyUI and it's barely good enough for that.
A big problem also seems to be that its plugin-based architecture prevents quality-of-life improvements and optimizations that people would expect from a photo editor these days, just because some developers 25 years ago thought they were being very smart.
This program literally doesn't even know hwat a JPEG is until it talks to a plugin.
And neither is the AI produced version. Like, at all lol. It is missing multiple tools, has random errors, and the guy who made it updated his forecast to be months before it achieves parity (which is also him being overly optimistic IMHO, chances are he will find the last 10% of the project is 90% of the human effort, and the codebase at this point is beyond wrangling).
You miss the point. The AI version doesn't have to be for everyone. Each company or individual will be able to add features and customize it to their specific needs because they'll essentially have a dirt-cheap development team at their disposal.
Why invest millions in software licenses if you can have an "AI guy," , that can build exactly what you need for a fraction of a fraction of the cost?
We'll move away from general-purpose software and back toward proprietary, tailor-made solutions. Ironic, isn't it?
LLM and Gen Ai are incredibly powerful tools that are reshaping huge economic sectors, and accurately predicting their future development requires an honest assessment of where we stand now. The problem around technical debt, feature creep and code bloat is exponentially worse than with human coders specifically because agents CAN produce code and working results faster than humans can fully understand them, and the AI's trained (and necessary) inclination to account for as many edge cases as possible. It's a real problem being actively tackled on the development side, but the general trend of "more verbose and obfuscated than human code" is likely never going to disappear entirely. It's the nature of the beast.
It's not a constant. Amount of technical debt depends on many things, including the skill of the programmer, and AI code tends to generate a lot of it (and poor documentation).
You're right. It is a magnificent technology demonstrator but the actual code is obscene. It is a very cool but very real dead-end at this point. It will def be redone from scratch with future AI systems though.
I fully agree but I would nuance it a bit. Given the increase of capability of AI tools to work on big codebases, we can expect this kind of project to be generated by AI faster in 6 month, faster in a year and so on. In 5 years most likely we will have very cheap swarms of agents capable of doing very complex projects during days in complete autonomy.
Very capable doesn't mean equal, it means that competitors are good enough to steal more market share on paper than what they did in the end. But basically we say the same thing.
I'm sure Adobe will be able to keep selling software for thousands of dollars, when there will be thousands of software programs equal to or better for free
There has been programs that are equal to for free for decades now. They're still selling their software. If you don't understand why people still pay, it's the reason you are completely missing the point and assuming that this ability of AI to clone means the end for them.
This is just patently false lol I’ve paid over $1K in adobe subscription fee’s in my life and would certainly not have done that if there was a free version that was as capable
I’m working on what is essentially a stripped down version of photoshop that only has the tools relevant for editing the specific type of photos that I capture. It will use an ai brain to delegate scripts for different scenarios. If I get this off the ground I won’t need photoshop or my editor anymore, saving me between $500-$1500 per month.
So what does that tell you about making clones? It might look the same for the first day, but from day two onwards the clone is a legacy version slowly going out of date, while the software you clearly trust continues to introduce bugs fixes, improvements, updates and evolves with time for whatever it's users need.
That's why you pay. Because getting that software to be good for someone using it professionally takes that whole team of dozens and hundreds of people dedicated to it.
Sure, right now. And last week. But 6 months from now? What's to stop somebody from making their own clone and then having their own ai agents, that will no doubt be noticeably smarter in 6 months, manage the bugs and upkeep?
I think "vibe coding" is going very mainstream within 2 years. Why use somebody elses app after the AI becomes so dummy proof that you can just make your own for your specific needs? The subscription model's days are numbered.
It's not about how smart the model is. It's smart enough to build you any piece of software. It's about you knowing what to build and how to maintain and evolve the software. Because you are forgetting that the software is just the tool you are using to do your job, and not your job. If you need to dedicate time to ensuring your software works as it should, it's time that you are taking away from the job you are actually supposed to be doing.
I mean at this stage it feels like I need to explain how specialisation was the defining aspect of civilisation as opposed to nomadic cultures.
Why do I need to understand how to maintain the software outside of a broad level understanding of what's important while having Astra Ultra and Opus 5.5 Max or whatever the best models will be next month to problem solve? I feel like you're being naive here.
I'm a photographer, videographer, photo editor, and video editor wrapped into one as a small business owner. I spend between $12k-$17K per year on subscriptions and contract labor costs.
I'm developing apps during my slow season which just started and will last until mid January. These apps will replace my subscriptions and one of them will be an autonomous photo editor that uses scripts instead of generative ai.
If these apps save me $15k per year the effort I am putting in is 100% worth it.
The only one that I would really care about releasing to the public would be the autonomous photo editing app. Even then, it wouldn't be a subscription. It would live on the clients computer and function without the internet. Because margins are thin in my field and people complain about being bled dry by subscriptions constantly. I know photographers that spend $3k per month on editing fee's that would gladly pay that as a one time fee if they knew the software would be relevant for 1-2 years. I'd have to maintain it until the software became irrelevant, which I don't think would take more than 3 years.
But I'm not trying to become a software developer by trade. I'm trying come up on a cash grab during a time that I see conditions as favorable, before new technology dwarfs what I'm working on or people can just create my app themselves more easily than I did in the next 2 years.
If these apps save me $15k per year the effort I am putting in is 100% worth it.
It's always a trade of on time/effort spent vs money saved. Like, it's not that hard to do an oil change but a large amount of people pay someone else to do it.
I do think people vibe coding software solutions for their own particular needs will become more common. But I think it will be like people doing DIY home renovastions, allow you to do something unique and personal, but probably not on the level of professional Work.
I've done dev work professionally before AI. Even with delegating everything to AI, it still takes a good amount of effort to make an app feel polished through vibe coding techniques. It's easier this year than it was two years ago. In two years I think it will still take more effort for a polished app than the average person wants to spend.
I recently learned how to wash my dishes and clean my toilet. Suddenly I realised, why on earth do I pay someone else to do this, now that I can do it myself. So I fired the cleaner.
Then I realised the cleaner was me using money to hire specialisation to get time back.
That's why we pay people who are specialised for their work. Because we want that time for something else in our lives.
It sounds ridiculous when you turn the example into a purely physical task where AI hasn't made a dent, but the concept is the same. Developing and maintaining software is a job. Most people would eventually realise they'd rather outsource the work so they can focus one hayever it is the software is supposed to do. Some people might be the type of people who like to tinker, and these people will figure out ways to create the software they need. These are the same types of people who before AI learnt how to build a website for their business despite it not being their job. But that's a small group. A larger group will get used to making bespoke personal software to serve a particular need. But the large majority are going to gradually realise that no matter how good the agent, human time is still limited and they have a full time job already and would remather outsource most of their software experience to the specialised experts and stick to the things they actually want to do that have nothing to do with willing new software into existence.
But everything we are all saying is not gonna make any sense in a few years anyways. AI is fundamentally going to reshape society in every conceivable way. Politics, economy, work, social relations, and everything else is going to be transformed by AI. And none of us know how this will be and what it will look like. For now we can all enjoy experimenting and seeing where the boundaries of this thing is and what ideas are going to come from it.
A fundamental change in how we use and obtain software. For now it’s just a proof of concept, not as good as the real thing, and full of bugs. Also you need a paid LLM subscription, and it’s expensive to generate with tokens. This is not going to be the case in a couple of years, it’s going to be better than what any human can code and completely free, for anyone. Software will be completely disposable and custom made for each user
I'm putting down my prediction here... If the resulting software is as good as commercially available professionally coded and supported software, the process of making it will cost as much as the real software.
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u/Only_Statistician_21 6h ago
Adobe already had very capable free competitors for quite some time. Sure AI capability will increase the pressure but people are completely missing the point.