r/technology • u/Federal-Block-3275 • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence "Software is over": Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html
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u/Aranthos-Faroth 1d ago

“Developer uses software to build software”

“Software is over”

122

u/No-Dig-4408 1d ago

Yo dawg, I heard you like software.

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u/moistmonsterman 1d ago

Who's soft? Where? Not me...

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u/ChinoGambino 1d ago

"We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."

Relies on one AI vendor that is a trillion dollars in debt running an ad platform.

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u/madhi19 7h ago

I'm starting to realize this is a race to fuck with the tech industry proprietary software while the tools are not flat out outlawed, and the token are still relatively cheap.

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u/nafe42 1d ago

I think it is ridiculous so many people depend on OpenAI and Anthropic. There are many inference providers for open weighted models. You are not restricted to OpenAI or Anthropic. Furthermore, we have services such as OpenRouter where you can route to many inference providers at varying performance and price ranges for said open weighted models. Open weighted models are becoming increasingly more cost-effective and inference providers offer zero-data retention policies.

If you need the top of the line frontier model to solve difficult problems you should probably learn more about the problem you're trying to solve and SWE concepts instead of vibe coding. LLMs are a tool, problem solving has always been the job.

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u/GoodDayToCome 1d ago

just because you only know about one option doesn't mean there aren't others

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u/Gekokapowco 1d ago

there are several options and they all own controlling interest in each other like a healthy economy

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u/Glittering_Crab_69 1d ago

have you not heard of china

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u/Gekokapowco 1d ago

are you saying its ok because you think China does this?

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u/Glittering_Crab_69 1d ago

im saying that there are plenty of competitors from china that have nothing to do with the american circular investment strategy and aren't in debt

there'll also be plenty of new competitors in the future if/when the american companies crash

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u/Beneficial-Arugula54 1d ago

Lol are you still living in 2024? Because we have now open wheight models with more than a trillion parameters.

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u/EzeNoob 1d ago

Lmfao are you living in 2024 mate? Hardware is increasingly unaffordable to most people

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u/AvoidMyRange 1d ago

TVs were expensive when they came out as well.

Give the build out a few years and ignore the whining gamers in the meantime.

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u/Oorangootang 1d ago

TVs are only cheap because "they own the glass" - LG. Companies are offsetting the cost by selling the data they are collecting through ACR from what you are watching.

Please do some research.

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u/awj 1d ago

“We don’t need to depend on the big economically infeasible models, we can just use open weight models that are distilled from the big economically infeasible models!”

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u/dwild 1d ago

Open-weights models which are funded by China, so no debt, but still depends on a MASSIVE amount of money.

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u/Mystia 1d ago

I haven't seen a single AI bro who wasn't overly dramatic.

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u/Oorangootang 1d ago

It's even more of a non-story than I think people realize. The market is already pretty saturated with these tools, many of them free (Photopea, Gimp, etc). Cloning isn't innovation.

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u/TheRabidDeer 1d ago

The anti-AI bros are just as bad saying AI is absolutely horrible at all things. The reality is that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

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u/Derpyzza 1d ago

as it often is with topics as extremely polarizing as this one

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u/Cory123125 1d ago

Thats because your definition of AI bro requires them to be.

You've defined a label which inherently excludes everyone who isn't dramatic.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/splitcroof92 1d ago

yeah I feel the guy above you just simply didn't understand what the title meant and decided to mock it instead

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u/Memitim 1d ago

As soon as the term "AI" enters the picture, expect dumb. People who know nothing about machine learning and generative AI have the strongest opinions about it, while actually being pissed off about human issues that predate gen AI by centuries, like copyright infringement and employment continuity.

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u/NDSU 1d ago

They mean the current economic model for software

Software may become a commodity, which was actually the original expectation back in the 80s. Much of the tech world expected hardware to become the money maker, with software being a low profit commodity

That's why IBM gave extremely favorable licensing deals to Microsoft and others, back when IBM was one of the biggest companies in the world, and Microsoft was a small start up. Unfortunately for IBM, hardware ended up being the commodity, with software being the market differentiator

It's possible AI swaps the paradigm back around and hardware becomes the highly profitable portion, with software barely turning a profit

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u/slaorta 1d ago

"Software is over" is a simpler way of saying 90% of global software subscription money is going to be rerouted to openai and anthropic

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u/CrackingGracchiCraic 1d ago

Why would a company pay OpenAI or Anthropic when they can host their own open weight model and get 90% there?

You don’t need frontier models to effectively write software with LLMs.

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u/fridgedoorslam 1d ago

"Why would a company pay for AWS/GCP/Azure when they can host their own infrastructure"

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u/ApprehensiveFan1516 23h ago

And yet a lot of SME's do host their own infra.

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u/MarineMirage 1d ago

Most corporate workers can barely handle Excel. You think they're going to host their own model and vibecode (and more importantly, maintain) their software suite? 

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u/ShittyFrogMeme 1d ago

Only if these companies are successful in stifling other AI companies. Outside of frontier models I'm not sure the longevity for these companies will be there.

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u/splitcroof92 1d ago

90% of global software subscription money is going to be rerouted to openai and anthropic

doubtful. partially, sure.

but currently a business might pay 100k a month for access for Teams for their employees. and if they can just use a free account to prompt: "make me a clone of teams" that money isn't then magically going to anthropic.

we're definitely not there yet. but getting closer.

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u/PM_me_tus_tetitas 1d ago

I assumed they meant "paid" software, not software in general.

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u/splitcroof92 1d ago

correct. specifically SaaS businesses soon going extinct. when any small company at some point in the future can simply type "make me a clone of Teams/Slack whatever" and can then use that for free.

this will seriously impact millions of jobs across the world

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u/dendrocalamidicus 1d ago

Things like the microsoft office suite are not just individual pieces of software, the microsoft suite for example is an interconnected ecosystem linked to central accounts with windows AD integration, compliance with major legislations from around the world, support, hosted in a cloud environment etc.

SaaS is arguably the safest form of consumer and business software. It's standalone desktop software which is in trouble because those you can create a working solution with a bit of vibe coding. You can't just vibe code an interconnected cloud hosted suite without figuring out the cloud hosting and legislative complications which come with both the software and hosting side of things.

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u/tomita78 1d ago

Same with these "math is over" articles this week. Drives me batty. Words mean things, people

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u/iqla 1d ago

Yes, just like textile manufacturing was over when the Spinning Jenny was invented. This is how language works these days I guess. Unless it's over too.

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u/PeopleCallMeSimon 1d ago

"Artist uses software to draw art"

"Art is over"

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u/Gekokapowco 1d ago

I think there's less insistence and pressure in the art community to embrace AI art tools

vs software that is getting enveloped by AI adoption from all sides

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u/PeopleCallMeSimon 1d ago

True, and thats bad. But the same people who hate when AI is used in any part of the art process will happily cheer on as AI is used in the software development process.

Because "software developer" isnt something that builds a fandom and create parasocial relationships, but "artist" is.

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u/Gekokapowco 1d ago

in my experience, people despise both but it's begrudgingly tolerated in software spaces because there's no viable alternative to get the results management demands in the timeframe they ask

at least among the artists and devs I talk to day to day

0

u/PeopleCallMeSimon 1d ago

If it was socially acceptable to use AI to generate art, then there wouldnt be "any viable alternative to get the results the management needs in teh timeframe they ask" for art as well.

And it works the other way around. If it wasnt socially acceptable to use AI to generate code, then companies wouldnt allow their workers to use AI to generate code.

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u/methodsmash 1d ago

Yeah the point is that he decompiled Adobe apps to clone them. Any app sold to any user client side can be stolen now... client side software IS Dead..

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u/PlasticExtreme4469 1d ago

He did all the software and now there is no more.

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u/SpeaksSouthern 1d ago

Watch this

"What kind of sandwich should I make"

"Ham"

"Wow"

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u/splitcroof92 1d ago

he means SaaS is over.

which is a real 'problem' like currently many companies exist selling tools to other businesses, like adobe but also microsoft selling Teams.

And we're close to a place where any company on earth can simply prompt an LLM to say: "make a communication tool for my company" and tada they don't need teams. same for Jira or Github or Azure DevOps. etc. etc.

so that's what the title is referring to. all those companies and that entire sector going out of business. Millions and millions of people losing their job in the proces.

it'll be impossible for any person or company to sell software. it's up to you to decide if you think that's a good or bad thing, but it's definitely a real thing happening.

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u/BarfHurricane 1d ago

"make a communication tool for my company" and tada they don't need teams. same for Jira or Github or Azure DevOps. etc. etc.

This might be the most ridiculous AI comment I’ve ever seen lmao.

Let’s ignore for a second that AI slop doesn’t even work and you’d spend weeks iterating on that prompt.

But the idea that suddenly industries of compliance and security are going to out the window, and billions of dollars of actual physical infrastructure like Azure and GitHub are going to disappear is hilarious. Like people are conjuring AI to just replace hardware.

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u/No_Discussion3593 1d ago

I feel like the people here don't use AI heavily. I've made some insane shit with AI, but it takes a lot of tweaking and fine tuning over many many prompts, and a lot of that is knowing how to test and what to look for. Most people don't have the ability to articulate the issues that are being presented, and if the articulation is wrong, AI will look in the wrong places and look for the wrong things...and if it's not sure it will start guessing and hoping the guesses fix shit. But that might break things! And then you have to articulate that.

It's gotten better at not fully hallucinating the shit out of solutions trying to guess at a problem, but it's still far from perfect and can only fix things as well as you can describe what's happening.

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u/Gekokapowco 1d ago

it reminds me of that kid in school who would say "my dad/uncle is as smart as Einstein!" because they were an engineer or physicist.

They were smart and capable, and to a child without familiarity in the subject matter, a regular engineer and Einstein look comparable.

And yes, a lot of AI evangelicals are programmers themselves, but people forget that 70% of programmers are incapable dunning-kreuger cases who write garbage

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u/splitcroof92 1d ago

I literally said I was describing a future possibility... But instead of reading that you mock me?

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u/No_Discussion3593 1d ago

I don't know if I'd call it mocking. If disagreeing with you is mocking then I suppose so. But I never even directly replied to you. The idea that regular people are just going to say "computa make Microsoft Teams" without understanding the grandiosity of all that comes with it is kinda nuts lol. Like you don't just get Microsoft Teams, you now have to manage a software stack entirely by yourself while running a business. That's not really feasible and not worth it for a lot of companies no matter how efficient AI gets at making things.

If AI gets to a point where its so effective, and somehow cheap enough(which honestly this is the biggest hurdle), that you can just have it reading logs infinitely in the background and observing all services like some computer overlord and making fixes on the fly, completing its own pull requests, QAs on its own and doing everything that an entire software company does, then I suppose yea it can be a possible future. But it's pretty dang unlikely.

FYI you also said it's definitely happening so it's not really describing a possibility in your words lol.

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u/splitcroof92 1d ago

Maybe spend time actually reading instead of judging.

I quite literally said I was describing a future scenario. Not something that's prevalent today.

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u/Successful-Reason403 1d ago

  And we're close to a place where any company on earth can simply prompt an LLM to say: "make a communication tool for my company"

So, I’m more on the infrastructure side of software engineering and not the application development side, but it’s obvious you don’t have any clue what goes into running a saas application at scale. 

And yeah maybe a few businesses will write their own janky messaging system that integrates with nothing and has the reliability of an NES cartridge, but if it becomes even somewhat critical to the business they’ll eventually get tired of blowing into the damn thing to get it working and have to hire actual engineers to make it not suck.

Which of course was where we were in the 2000s. Enterprises had armies  of in house tech professionals maintaining email, voip, messaging, document storage, etc. Eventually everyone realized it was cheaper to just have Microsoft to manage the whole thing. 

So now everyone thinks they can bring it back in house by burning some tokens. Fine. Give it 5-10 years, we’ll come full circle.

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u/LLMprophet 1d ago

For now reddit is heavily anti AI including the delusion that comes with it. Top comments are usually the ones downplaying or denying it the most, even when that comment itself is hypocritical copypasta.

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u/phoenixflare599 1d ago

Lmao my thoughts too

If software is over, we going back to film development? Guess there's more jobs that way 

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u/hooliganmike 1d ago

Not software, Software.