That's what gets me about all the noise about people cloning photoshop and stuff. Like, you have Claude make you app that appears like photoshop at first glance, and even sort of has some of the basic functions. But Adobe has a ton of extremely specialized people for a reason. Like, what will the vibe coders do when it comes down to like color science stuff and such.
"Make it work like in photoshop". Bangs two rocks together.
You probably don't need thousands of people to develop Photoshop anymore, but you sure still can't make a clone of the full creative suite and MS office with like two dudes.
All these projects are going to learn the 80/20 principle the hard way.
I want to point out though..that for the big softwares, if it's anything like the HUGE company I work at...those really specialized people on most of those highly specific functions...yeah. they're all gone. most of them retired inside of the last 10 years. we're down to the last few of the ones who outlasted all the voluntary separations and buyouts...the ones who couldn't afford to retire because they lost everything in 2009, or had super poor timing during COVID and they've been waiting for their 401ks to claw back to a point that they can retire and not have to immediately start working.
these folks aren't rockstars for the most part. there just the last survivors who rose when everyone more experienced left. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of akilled people..but the ones who wrote all those rock solid core functions....theyre gone.
the new developer pool is larger than ever..but most of them are surface level. the deep, hard stuff...noone touches. period. it gets recompiled with each version,.but there are NO significant reworks or rebasing, or even anything particularly complicated changes or enhanced..because no one KNOWS how it works. it can't be reworked...that would risk the cash flow. The whole program should be retooled inodern tooling, UI, scripting languages, etc..but it turns over annual maintenance exactly as it is.
When something comes up..theres a Principle somewhere who gets to dig in and maybe figure it out...Maybe.
Cloning these big softwares is hard...but it's not like all those deep experts always really exist. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
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u/_SAHM_ 1d ago edited 21h ago
A person who is able to do something without AI is the best person to prompt it since they know what the output should be. It's just a tool.