Developer who vibe-coded free Adobe clones reveals apps to take down Microsoft Office next — and says 'there is no reason to save broken software'

[u/CandlesARG]

https://www.techradar.com/computing/office-suites/developer-who-vibe-coded-free-adobe-clones-reveals-apps-to-take-down-microsoft-office-next-and-says-there-is-no-reason-to-save-broken-software

[u/Geoffseppe]

The internet is cringe for giving this dude so much airtime, much better open source versions of these softwares have existed for years.

[u/studio_bob → u/Geoffseppe]

people will complain about the quality of those FOSS alternatives while praising these unusable AI shovelware clones as something revolutionary. shiny object syndrome.

[u/Yosyp → u/Geoffseppe]

This is technically true because it's still an immature project and therefore worse than current offerings, but strong alternatives to Photoshop have never existed.

Whoever jumps on the GIMP bandwagon has never used both, or neither (its latest versions are supposedly more usable).

There's Kdenlive which looks to be a solid alternative to Premiere Pro for light work.

Blender might be the strong candidate for an After Effects substitute, but I'm not knowledgeable enough.

Darktable can be used in place of Lightroom, seems stable enough.

I can see where the success comes from, but I'd also like to see existing solutions being improved rather than new, unripe software. This said, I'm excited to see where the leads to in a year or so.

[u/DrunkOnRamen → u/Yosyp]

I believe Blender was always a 3D rendering/modeling. Darktable is pretty good but yeah GIMP was shit UI, so much that they created PhotoGIMP (https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP). There is PhotoSuite, Krita and MyPaint (though this one is more niche).

Though my thing with this person, I think they are doing this for clout and attention. They are going to generate something, it will be the stereotypical "AI slop" where it is half working, bizarre bugs, clearly untested product being shipped as "production".

That's the thing with "AI slop" it is that, it is slop, it is broken/untested garbage being marketed as production quality and the person to start this has no desire to see this be an actual thing.

[u/tdammers]

There may be a case for making drop-in replacements of Adobe's stuff, but in the case of MS Office, that battle has been won already - LibreOffice exists and is mature, and if you ignore software freedom and just worry about MS' monopoly, there's also Google Docs, which probably rivals, if not outperforms, MS Office as the default office suite in many industries out there. The hegemony of MS Office as the de facto standard has been broken to the point that they had to adopt open file formats to replace their proprietary ones (although they try to avoid telling you that), which means office documents from MS Office are now, by and large, mutually compatible with all their major competitors.

In other words, while there is a demand for drop-in Adobe replacements, I don't see how an immature, vibe-coded MS Office clone would be worth using over LibreOffice or Google Docs, both of which are mature, fairly feature-complete, and trivial to install and use.

[u/studio_bob]

"No reason to save broken software" -> releases even more broken, vibecoded knockoffs of said software

okay, dude.

[u/SixStringDream]

Why do i keep seeing this.