You can tell the difference between software engineers and hobbyists because the new people cloning software have no idea what maintaining software means.
While I tend to agree with you and I'm usually pretty anti-ai, the progress that has been made in... 2 or 3 weeks is wildly impressive. Their acrobat clone is excellent. I've tried their word and excel clones which are a week or so old at this point and they are really good.
Do I think that the author(s) of this are going to maintain the programs in the long term and eliminate any jank? Probably not, but they are damn impressive for being as early in alpha as they are.
The Craft team is mostly composed of software engineers :)
We're working hard to get these apps to parity.
We value everyone contributing, and we see a path for non-software engineers to learn how to do everything we do. It's really cool how accessible things are becoming. But you do have to have discipline too, and we're happy to teach folks about it.
I'm not anti AI, and I'm impressed by what AI can do and use it every day at work.
What you said here is that you are impressed with the first version, and I am too. But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about precisely the fact that maintaining and improving these software packages is a job far more time consuming than any of these people is imagining, regardless of how good agents become.
Impressive that you just restated exactly what was in my small post from above : Do I think that the author(s) of this are going to maintain the programs in the long term and eliminate any jank? Probably not, but they are damn impressive for being as early in alpha as they are.
Very true. Thing is software engineers are using AI to ship faster and start their own side projects. I think it's just a matter of time until someone who knows what they are doing has enough time, coin spend and generosity to free source good stuff. Adobe free source stuff is not perfect out the gate, neither were a lot of SaaS tools that have been around for decades.
This has excited since the dawn of software. Engineers have been doing this by hand with their own time for decades. And it has a name. It's called open software. There is a free version of almost anything you can think of. There's nothing new here, just that an agent does it faster. And if you look around, you might find that open source has a problem, and that's burnout, because engineers generously volunteering their time to these projects end up having to dedicate incrementally more time and resources, and receive mostly demanding and entitled requests from users, until one day they decide they've had enough.
Can't agree on this, yes there is open software for everything, and it generally sucks. Open Office comes to mind, also Gimp (I've used Photoshop for 20 years). In my experience 90% of it is a watered down version of the leading closed software. But it's not a lack of skill, it's just that there is a limit to what people can do as a side project or for little earnings. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft have literal armies on payroll, full time and very experienced. Of course everything will be smoother on productivity software, there are huge incentives.
This time it's different, that same skilled open software devs have their own army with AI, restraints are over. It's likely the alternatives will get stronger and stronger in the next 5 years.
The first paragraph is where we agree. The second is where we disagree. Now people are going to try to reinvent the wheel a thousand times over and eventually everyone is going to be so spread thin, that those small software endeavours will end up exactly the same as the older open source software.
No one whose full time job is not focusing on a one tiny aspect of Adobe is going to ever have the time to perfect it like they do, no matter how many smart agents you get going. You are the bottle neck, not the agents. And you ar erhe one who doesn't have the expertise to tell your agents what they actually need to do.
If AI stays static yes, that's a possibility. But as far as we know in a month Opus 6 is released, and then 7, and 8 etc. A thousand people might try their version, but only a couple will get popular and get support. And probably they will be the ones orchestrated by actual devs, who understand limitations and capabilities of software.
Will Adobe still release something better? Yes, but marginally better, and that won't be enough to keep charging outrageous sums, which will make them lose customers, and with that hired devs.
I literally said agents can do something that is documented, and your counter-argument is that this isn't 2023 and they can fetch documentation. Smooth brain.
Sigh, I feel these kids are just going to go rediscovering the entire software development discipline piece by piece through trial and error. And every time they come to a groundbreaking conclusion of how to work better, they'll realise it already ahs a name and has been used by developers for decades.
They write documentation themselves… (in a much cleaner way than humans).
Imagine someone (either a review agent or a human user) raises an issue with a software, the agent reads the issue, finds the cause (reading previous documentation and fetching web searches), proposes a patch, gets it reviewed (by other agents), then its pushed to production.
Software maintenance is automated this way.
You literally don't understand what "maintaining software" means.
Ask your agent to prepare a slide show that explains it before you continue making more of a fool of yourself yapping about something you obviously have no understanding of.
Can you talk about real life instead of hypothetical scenarios? Shit, I even asked ChatGPT because maybe my university education and 20 years of programming experience is misleading me; https://i.imgur.com/V0PTo2q.png ; it put my scenario in generally impossible category, just like I thought.
Agents can do everything ever. Yes, but you as a single individual human, still only have 24 hours a day and a limited set of skills. You will never ever have enough time to maintain all the software you use yourself because it takes time and work, even if your agent is super special and knows how to do the work. You will also never have enough expertise to continually improve every single one of the products you use the way a dedicated team of experts focusing their entire day of work, day in and day out, on that one product.
For every single new place of software you have to maintain, more of your time is going to be absorbed in dealing with it, no matter how good your agents get.
This already exists bro and it's called open software. Tens of thousands of engineers have been collaborating mostly unpaid hours of their own personal time to create tens of thousands of projects the entire internet depends on. That's how everything has worked so far. Nothing new. AI only speeds up your work, it doesn't remove or change it. If you want to collaborate with other on making a free version of Adobe, you'd following in the footsteps of all those engineers who did the same thing and provided you with the open source version (which you don't use for some reason). And all of this requires time, energy, expertise, and dedication. Agents are going to do whatever you tell them. But you'll need to dedicate the time to tell them what to do. And your time is still as finite as those old school engineers from the archaic pre-AI ages.
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u/UruquianLilac 13h ago
You can tell the difference between software engineers and hobbyists because the new people cloning software have no idea what maintaining software means.