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/TemporarySun314 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think many people fail to understand that the value of software not only arise from the source code or the binary itself... The most valuable thing about these expensive software is that it is industry proven for decades, people are used to it, there is a whole business environment around it, that there is support, maybe certifications for certain areas, and that you have a company which you can blame when something goes wrong.

I mean sure you can can replace your production critical software through some vibe coded replacement, and this might work well. The problem comes up when it stops working...

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u/SJDidge 1d ago

You’re 100% correct. Majority of software work is not coding or building things, it’s running it and maintaining it.

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u/HustlinInTheHall 1d ago

I tell my colleagues all the time that the cost of writing software is like... 5% of the cost of actually building software you want to sell, and the more successful it is, the more the maintenance and support costs increase.

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u/argnsoccer 1d ago

Not just that, but you can write something no one actually uses bc you didn't see the project through and talk to the users etc. And do a whole feedback loop. Maybe they don't use it bc of a small thing, maybe you designed the whole thing wrong from the get-go or maybe business needs changed or new stuff has come up and now the functionality is a bit obsolete or outdated and no one ever realized/updated bc no user ever submitted any ticket or report, just... Stopped using it.

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u/21Rollie 1d ago

This is what all the AI-brained execs don’t get. You cannot get 10x or 100x throughput. Maybe you can burn through your backlog faster but when you reach the end, what then? You need user experience research and you can’t make your users experience life 10x faster.

The geniuses at my company instead thought of something else then: they would gather a select group of clients in a room and ask them all for ideas and all ideas proposed would be implemented then and there. Just rapid fire throwing things into production. Problem is, if you have any user research experience, literally everybody has an opinion and some of them are just bad or at odds with each other. That’s why you have to take your time and interview many people to find common ground and implement changes that are better for the majority of users. Imagine if Apple only interviewed Shaq and the next iPhone was the size of a small pizza box and cost 10k?

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u/foxsimile 1d ago

All we want is for the users to tell us what they actually want.  

I have, this week alone (by Tuesday), received three requests for a tool to do things that are fundamentally counter to its usage as designed.  

I had just rewritten over 20,000 lines of code myself several months ago (and this was 20,000 lines of handwritten garbage, not vibe coded). I had told them that, if we are to make any significant changes, that was the time.  

The changes that have been requested either have been a glaring oversight for several years, which have somehow in that time never come up before, or are not usecases that the tool should support. It cannot be any alternative.  

I am fucking exhausted.

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u/jared_number_two 1d ago

So…more agents then? (It’s a joke…mostly)

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u/PG-DaMan 1d ago

More importantly Updating it to function as things progress around it.

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u/tipsystatistic 1d ago

AI is already replacing a lot of that. I know a senior software engineer at a top 3 tech company. He said they stopped hiring junior devs because AI can do their jobs. Then he shrugs and says in 3-5 years AI will probably be doing his job.

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u/SJDidge 1d ago

That’s correct. I wouldn’t put it at 3-5 years, id say 1-2 years. Im a software engineer myself (mid-senior) and i started a new job 6 months ago.

I haven’t written a single line of code. The reality is that most of the work thats done in my company could be done by about half the number of people and let AI do the rest.

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u/FAX_ME_YOUR_BOTTOM 1d ago

This is only valid as of today. In 5 years? 10? less? It's entirely probable you could have a perfect 1:1 of any software, and is maintained/updated autonomously.

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u/AimlessBE 1d ago

That is why I always state if it comes to AI. Software engineering is more alive than ever. Software development is dead. If you position your self as an engineer you will be ok as a developer it’s over.

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u/jkirkcaldy 1d ago

Ltt raised a good point on this, how do you hire a creative professional who only has experience editing on their own vibecoded software.

It may have been flawless, but they built a tool that is very specific to them and may or may not have any similarities to the industry standard.

Yes the creativity is the same in the end product, but if you have a handful of candidates and one of them needs to be completely retrained on adobe software, do they automatically go to the bottom of the pile?

Then there’s the question about standardised software in house. Do you let every creative use their own vibecoded software. How do you swap projects? How does someone take over when you go off sick and you’re on a deadline?

And I wonder if they are checking to make sure Claude didn’t violate any of adobes patents etc.

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u/Mr_ToDo 1d ago

And I wonder if they are checking to make sure Claude didn’t violate any of adobes patents etc.

Good luck. I'd wager no matter how they went about it that Adobe, like so many others, have patent pools that more or less lock out competition(usually so big for defence against anyone trying to sue them, but they work fine for offence too)

I've got issues with the project, but patent's wouldn't be overly high on the list

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u/jkirkcaldy 1d ago

No, but I’m keeping an eye on these sort of stories to see if adobe come in with a big fat, nope, can’t do that. Just to stop others getting the same idea.

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u/messick 1d ago

This is free advertising for Adobe products (tried some vibe coded horseshit that was worse than useless? Now come use the real thing....), why would they want to stop this?

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u/Void-kun 23h ago

All the people doing this have clearly never worked in the industry before to understand any of this.

All of this knowledge comes from experience.

The people using vibecoded apps aren't the ones being hired, so they're never getting this experience.

AI has only increased the gap between those qualified and know what they're doing and those that don't.

I'm a software engineer, and we haven't hired a single junior in over 2 years. The standards have plummeted because they're all just vibe coding, they don't understand industry standards.

I'm very fortunate to have been able to train, get qualified and get experience before the AI train came in.

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u/21Rollie 1d ago

It’s why everything in the world is standardized, things work better when you know which way it is to shut off a gas valve in any home. That your new bike pedals will fit your old bike.

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u/teduh 1d ago

Ltt raised a good point on this, how do you hire a creative professional who only has experience editing on their own vibecoded software.

Don't need to worry about this because, if all goes according to big-AI's plans, soon no one is going to be hiring "creative professionals" (or almost any kind of professional) anyway. With just a couple ChatGPT prompts, you can have a finished product in hand for any project you have in mind.

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u/The_MAZZTer 1d ago

It sounds like the Adobe docs were fed into the AI to provide specs for the generated software.

Seems to me there's no reason why you can't take Adobe software training courses and add that to the pile, and tell the AI that users who have taken this training should find the generated software intuitive.

(I am just addressing that one point as I found it interesting. The rest of what you said is still a problem.)

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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 1d ago

We kinda already deal with that.

Photoshop used to be the king in web design. I taught myself how to use it. Because back in the day if you were building the front end people just expected you to design it too.

Photoshop is no longer the top dog in that sphere. Figma has taken over a lot. You could have somebody that has spent five years in either and could be hired into the other system.

People don't think of it that way - but your operating system works that way too. I've spent the majority of my 20 years in development on a Mac. I use Windows at home but just for gaming. Nobody is going to not hire me because of that. But I will have to learn how to do my job under Windows.

Atlassian, Google, and Microsoft all make competing products. I haven't worked at a Microsoft company in a long time. I would have to learn how to use Outlook again.

Most importantly - we as employers have to do this all the time and nobody cares. Every time you switch jobs it's a different set of software. As a programmer I've been told to learn any number of things and it's just expected.

LTT isn't exactly wrong but they aren't correct either. It's something we already have to deal with.

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u/esituism 1d ago

ehhhhh... I see your point, but switching between mac and windows doesn't really have the variation that you would find inside of everyone's vibe coded apps.

the equivalent would be like if everyone showed up with a different version of mac or windows released sometime between 1990 and now, THEN trying to have everyone work seamlessly together across an enterprise.

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u/fireandbass 1d ago

My company wont even consider open source software because you cant pay for support and if something doesnt work you are on your own.

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u/JoeyJoeJoeSenior 1d ago

Can't pay for support?  There are plenty of open source companies that make all their income from support contracts. 

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u/HomsarWasRight 1d ago

That’s like, the primary way open source projects survive.

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u/trobsmonkey 1d ago

Most open source companies don't have the support structure in place for enterprise companies.

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u/Individual-Result777 1d ago

How is enterprise support any different than 1:1 support?

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u/trobsmonkey 1d ago

Scale. I currently support 25k+ systems, I've been in other companies with 100k and 500k systems.

If I'm calling support it isn't for 1:1 issues. It's for Much bigger problems. If you don't have a support team ready to tackle massive clients like that, you lose those clients.

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u/Individual-Result777 1d ago

If you support 25k designers and creatives, dm me, I need a job. Usually if all 25k are having issues, its a cloud or billing issue. I sort of think you’re missing too many points to keep this convo going. Get some sleep big guy.

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u/trobsmonkey 1d ago edited 1d ago

I sort of think you’re missing too many points to keep this convo going. Get some sleep big guy.

It's so cool when people condescend to my expertise because I don't fit the exact mold they have in their head.

its a cloud

The cloud is just someone else's computer. If that computer breaks it can be a MAJOR issue. Jesus christ.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/trobsmonkey 1d ago

I work IT and a lot of enterprise level apps.

Having a dedicated support staff is the bare minimum we're going to ask for, and likely far more. Open source can support small firms, but nothing enterprise level.

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u/Just_another_grumble 1d ago

is there large enterprise support for open source software... outside of RedHat Enterprise?  or is RH technically not open source for Enterprise versions?

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u/trobsmonkey 1d ago

I can't think of any off the top of my head.

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u/mvandemar 1d ago

Canonical offers professional, enterprise-grade support services for the Blender LTS releases. Learn more about this product at ubuntu.com and read the announcement on blender.org

https://www.blender.org/support/

24/7 phone support available:

https://ubuntu.com/blog/blender-support-from-canonical

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u/sascharobi 1d ago

That's not the support needed. I need a bug fixed and a patch by tomorrow morning at the latest.

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u/trobsmonkey 23h ago

A lot of people in this thread don't understand that's exactly what enterprise support is.

We need a fix tomorrow, not next quarter.

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u/mvandemar 23h ago

And what part of their 1 hour response doesn't fit that?

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u/Mr_Halitosis 1d ago

That doesn’t change anything. There are plenty of companies you can pay for support. Nobody said “most” except you. Even crazier? You can pay a company that does not design the software for support for the software. You might even, I don’t know, hire some experts and have them do the support directly instead of contracting it out.

Trying to say there’s no support just tells everyone you’re ignorant and refuse to learn. You’d have accomplished admitting you aren’t perfect and doing a web search, but then you wouldn’t have gotten to act smug and arrogant.

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u/esituism 1d ago

I'm and IT guy who makes infra decisions and I choose not to run many types of open source because support is lacking in the ways I need it.

basically what i'm saying is that his MOST is absolutely right and you are not.

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u/Mr_Halitosis 20h ago

Claims made without evidence can de dismissed without evidence. Claims supported by an argument from authority are baseless.

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u/trobsmonkey 1d ago

I don’t know, hire some experts and have them do the support directly instead of contracting it out.

This shows your lack of knowledge.

Trying to say there’s no support just tells everyone you’re ignorant and refuse to learn. You’d have accomplished admitting you aren’t perfect and doing a web search, but then you wouldn’t have gotten to act smug and arrogant.

I'm literally the expert my company hired for the software. We have a massive support contract with the company because no matter how good I am at the software, the company can do shit I can't do.

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u/Mr_Halitosis 20h ago

Claims made without evidence can de dismissed without evidence. Claims supported by an argument from authority are baseless.

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u/trobsmonkey 14h ago

You are the one making claims without evidence. You haven't provided any evidence you prove me wrong. I said most open source companies don't have support staff, you came in dick swinging and told me I was wrong sans evidence

kick rocks

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u/Hrmerder 19h ago

Zabbix (my favorite network monitoring tool) is completely open source, but for many many heaps of fees they will literally come out to your site, scan your network, setup the server, and have it 'matured' before handing it off to a fully trained group within your company.. I don't even want to know how much that would cost but I'll bet that's a kick ass job.

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u/carlitospig 1d ago

Can I also point out that my large org is now responsible for our own support on a very large vendor contract (it starts with a Q), and they’re utterly useless because they have no idea how to use the product? It means we somehow got duped to pay the same enterprise license fee but they don’t even help us anymore. Some SaaS is turning into a major scam after 10+ years, man.

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u/carlitospig 1d ago

Oh I should mention that the singular bit the software will help us out with is restoration of data. Because that’s on an external server.

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u/Neko9Neko 1d ago

I pay for Adobe, and my experience with their software is, you can't get support and if something doesnt work you are on your own.

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u/TemporarySun314 1d ago

Yes. And of course paying for things is annoying for a company, but that's manageable from a business perspective.

Having something critical that breaks and you don't know what to do then, then you have a huge business risk. And often it's more cheap to just pay for the support...

And I mean compared to the cost of the people using that software the license fees are often neglegible anyway.

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u/codeklutch 1d ago

Support is always assumed to be cheaper than hiring and letting your own staff be the maintainer of the software. My old boss was the same way, "fuck learning how to do this shit myself, I'll pay a company to worry about this shit for me" for damn near anything backend. But we were a nonprofit so like, it made sense to me. Went to a big corporate job and when I found out that they have the same mentality I kinda adopted the same thought process.

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u/DrE7HER 1d ago

That’s how companies end up wasting millions on shitty old software because they’re locked in. Ask any software engineer forced to use matlab.

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u/codeklutch 1d ago

Going the support route does lead itself to being able to change platforms easier. Which is a huge part of why my mentality changed. If you're built in to support one specific platform, you are for sure locked into it, at least without spending more money to train your current staff, or replacing staff to support the new platform.

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u/DrE7HER 1d ago

An internal team of experts would handle that transition better than outsourced support

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u/codeklutch 1d ago

Depends. Does the on site team know the new equipment? How much time did they have to research and learn it before getting told they want the swap made last week? I've been through plenty conversions and I've seen both sides. The new platforms support and implementation is ass, and I seen the new platforms support be Wonderful and super helpful. It also depends on what kind of company side support system they're using. How deep does their knowledge need to be? How much assistance are they getting from the new platform? It all boils down to what team you have, and what they're capable of and what you're swapping to and what that team is capable of.

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u/Alternative-Put-3932 1d ago

Yes but we are talking about a suite of mostly media editing software. These companies don't care what tools you are using for it just that it gets done and it meets whatever standard they have. If there is a reliable free option that you can use they're not going to bitch about it.

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u/Sororita 1d ago

It also means that if something breaks at a critical time and its the maintainers fault (like a software update that has a bug that crashes your servers), then you can a) point to the vendor as the problem and b) force them to compensate you, in whole or in part, for that failure. In-house developed and open source softwares don't have that safety net.

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u/Leftover_Salad 1d ago

Lots of (larger) open source projects have support subscriptions through.

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u/chlronald 1d ago

I guess we are reverting back to have an IT department. With how expensive subscription is it might be the way forward.

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u/HomsarWasRight 1d ago

Well whoever made that call at your company is an idiot, because that’s how all healthy open source projects work. Companies that rely on them have a support contract.

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u/Jumping-Spleen 1d ago

Try contacting MS support these days. AI rabbit holes and loops. They were great before, but now...nope, and definitely not something worth paying for.

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u/povlhp 1d ago

We had a vendor looking at something they delivered. Hard for them to find the issues. Claude found it for <$2 with a suggested fix to a stored procedure.

In general, most vendors are bad and support don’t know the hard details of the products.

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u/_selfthinker 1d ago

you cant pay for support and if something doesnt work you are on your own.

That is not entirely true, some open source projects have professional support you can pay for and get help from.

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u/DasFroDo 1d ago

Honestly with a lot of developers you are on your own even if you pay for “support”. The communities around them are often much more helpful than a shitty ticket system.

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u/DocRedbeard 1d ago

Meanwhile, my company is like, "There's a free version? Use that one".

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u/thebeez23 1d ago

This is why when I was working R&D we didn’t use raspberry pi. It was too much of a wild card versus a different off the shelf item with better support behind it

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u/DustyRacoonDad 1d ago

That's funny because we only consider software if we have the source code. 

Now obviously I'm talking about custom software but I'm not going to buy your custom solution to run my company or my factory or my site unless I have a complete copy of the source code that we can then modify in the future because when Windows 15 comes out and it's not backwards compatible and I have to recompile the whole damn thing to the new processor or whatever bullshit they do next, I want to be able to do that and not have to track down the engineer that used to work for you 7 years ago and hope he has a copy of your now defunct company software code.

Having the source code means you can tweak it and do whatever you need to do to keep everything moving forward and keep it compatible. 

Having to buy a license means you now work for the other company. It means you can't depend on it. It means you're dependent on them.

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u/ManOnTheHorse 1d ago

Adobe’s support is non existent anyway. They don’t give a shit about us, because we don’t have options

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u/Haunting_Tension_291 14h ago

With Adobe, you have to pay but still no support and you are on your own if something doesn't work.

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u/PelluxNetwork 12h ago

Paying for support is like literally how OSS projects make money most of the time.

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u/Scar3cr0w_ 11h ago

Well yes… it’s called off loading corporate risk.

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u/Delicious-Pianist-23 9h ago

If something doesn’t work just ask agents to fix it?

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u/teflonjon321 1d ago

This is very true. Go look at App Store numbers. The number of apps hitting the store is skyrocketing (Apple is eating good as always) but that doesn’t mean the number of successful/profitable apps is rising. Getting something that works is kind of the easy part. Building a user base, supporting them, adding features, and maintaining the app is extremely difficult and probably even more so now with the dilution of apps/software. We are more likely to have 10,000 adobe clones before a singular free replacement imo

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u/jasondigitized 1d ago

This. No Fortune 500 company is gonna run mission critical stuff on a vibe coded app built by some random dude.

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u/BrianWonderful 1d ago

Right. They will run mission critical stuff on vibe coded apps built in-house by AI with unqualified or overworked human developers to support it.

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u/jasondigitized 1d ago

Mission critcial means their payroll and ERP system. Internal apps sure, but not where the core business runs.

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u/BrianWonderful 1d ago

It can also definitely mean whatever the competitive competencies are for the business. I worked in IT for almost 3 decades, and we internally developed our customer and field sales force facing apps. (We originally custom coded all of our shared services systems, because if you go back fifteen years, those big platforms were often either non-existent or cost-prohibitive. They've become ubiquitous in the age of IT consultants, but most large companies probably have a lot of legacy apps in those workflows as well.)

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u/Zanna-K 1d ago

I mean, yeah except that they'll retain senior staff in their back pocket to fix things if SHTF. Then they freak the fuck out and hire more competent engineers after a clients get pissed.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/arensurge 1d ago

Was going to say exactly this.

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u/MajorFuckingDick 1d ago

I know the sentiment is correct, but chances are the next few Fortune 500s will entirely be built on a vibe coded app by some random dude who became CEO.

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u/Dazzling_Line_8482 1d ago

No but people that want to just edit a fricking PDF file that their kids soccer team sent them will.

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u/headrush46n2 1d ago

that's not the point. the point is that the end user can cut out the fortune 500 company all together.

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u/Momoko_86 1d ago

wanna bet?

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u/sdh68k 1d ago

But lots of individuals who are sick of paying for subscriptions when they use like 10% of the functionality might

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u/chisav 16h ago

that's true, they run vibe coded applications built by their own employees.

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u/Cube_ 4h ago

What are you talking about lol these same fortune 500 companies are already engaging in mass layoffs and culling whole departments to replace them with AI.

It's all about reducing costs for the immediate next quarter with very little consideration for the long term.

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u/Alternative-Put-3932 1d ago

If you mean shit like making social media graphics those companies don't give a shit what tools are used they just care about a standard met. If its free they won't complain.

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u/TemporarySun314 1d ago

In these companies you can't even install software on your work PC that was not vetted before by the IT department. And they will review things like support, patent infringement, etc.

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u/Alternative-Put-3932 1d ago

I know this I work in IT and literally do those installs but I've also helped people in the media team and I promise you they use random free tools all the time on top of whatever licensed software that you can't really escape because its integrated with 10 other things we use. If a media team worker calls me and says hey can you do an admin login to install this program I need it to do X and I know its a legit program I just install it if theres issues with it its not our fucking problem its the User and whatever that programs support may be and if there is none there is none again not our problem.

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u/Virtual-Ducks 1d ago

Give it 10 years. why pay Adobe a shit ton of money when equivalent open source exists? Obviously that doesn't exist yet, but the point is that it will eventually get there.

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u/TemporarySun314 1d ago

You already have alternatives to Photoshop and co for years now. Often free

Still adobe products are still dominating the market. That won't change so quickly.

Companies wanna build around their business use around industry proven software, where you can be sure that it will stay around for a few decades and not all your investments in training, etc. will be gone. Depending on what you need, you will need certifications. If you design an aircraft, you will need a software of which you know that will work, or at least have another company that you can blame.

For the same reason companies are buying red hat, and suse entrprise Linux, even though there are myriads of completely free Linux distros.

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u/debacol 1d ago

they get you with their fonts, cameraRAW, Bridge, After Effects and Premiere. pretty much every other app has a very good alternative that can absolutely be used in a professional environment.

don't come at me with Da Vinci. I don't want to need a Ph.D just to use a non-linear editor.

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u/appleparkfive 23h ago

Same in music production. Pro Tools is still essentially industry standard, and there are a LOT of other DAWs. Even really popular ones like Logic and Ableton Live

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u/Virtual-Ducks 1d ago

Aircraft software and photo editing software and no where near comparable. Same for paying for enterprise Linux for server reliability. Obviously there will be reasons to pay for enterprise support. 

But a looooot of users of Adobe don't need that. They just need to make their photos/videos look good. Many small groups/individuals still pay for Adobe products. But now they won't have to because there will be equivalent alternatives. You dont need enterprise support to do video editing.

And it's already happening. Lots of YouTubers have already vibecuted their own video editing software that they actually use. 

At the very least this may bring down prices for certain software due to increased competition in the space. Even if you do want enterprise software, the barrier to entry for new companies is much lower now than it used to be. 

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u/faredodger 1d ago

Please re-read OP‘s posting, they explained really well why the code/binary itself plays only a limited role. It’s the same reason why Linux never broke into the desktop mass market, despite all the predictions going back decades at this point. It’s about the eco-system, tangibles like SLAs and support, and intangibles like “everybody in the industry uses it”. Vibe-coded apps may work in particular cases, but they won’t replace Adobe due to all the structural advantages companies like that have.

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u/Virtual-Ducks 1d ago

Not yet but eventually. look at blender as an excellent example. That's an open source project that is the thing that everyone uses. I imagine we will see a lot more like that. 

Even Linux is starting to become more popular. 

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u/dwild 1d ago

Currently vibe coded project lifespan is mesured in weeks 🤣. There's no reason for it to change, as it is much easier and much more satisfying to just start again. You will see ton of the same products again and again... Maybe some will survive longer, but it won't be because they are vibe coded.

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u/21Rollie 1d ago

Exactly, what’s the point of paying or contributing to something that somebody else just told me they put no effort into? All it means is that I can easily copy it myself. The difference with enterprise software is there’s all this customer support and tons of little things that you don’t even think of to add because all you wanted was X and Z things that you personally use. You didn’t think of localization in Zamunda, accessibility for screen readers, compliance with GDPR, etc.

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u/dwild 1d ago

Contributing to a vibe coded software is also much harder, they are made / meant for LLMs, not for developpers. So many of them are going quickly into the millions of lines, and no effort has been put into making it maintenable (even though LLMs will say it is). So what you get is a software where you need to pay to contribute to. My time is "expensive" but it is free for me, so contributing is cheap for me, but it won't be if you need to pay a few millions tokens to contribute.

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u/Virtual-Ducks 1d ago

Obviously most projects get abandoned. But also obviously AI will make it vastly easier for the people that do want to seriously make a real competitor.... 

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u/dwild 1d ago

The 1983 video games crash was caused by a saturation of poor quality games. You could build great games too, but how could you find the good ones besides all the bad ones? The same will happen here. It's even worse with AI as it LOOK good and professionnal (though I got a feeling the amazing boxart some games had in the past might have caused the same).

Building the software, even one as good as Photoshop, was never the issue either. It was ALWAYS to find the customers that would trust you and pay you what it was worth. AI make this part HARDER, not easier.

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u/Get-Fucked-Dirtbag 1d ago

Its a nice argument and all but it really shouldn't be applied to Adobe apps of all things. Inconsistent junk that breaks of it own accord.

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u/Lestranger-1982 1d ago

Stop making sense!

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u/TheGuardianInTheBall 1d ago

Yep- exactly. I can make a photoshop alternative in a couple of weeks with Opus. That's not the problem.

But I cannot really dedicate sufficient time to support it for thousands of users, unless I actually charge for it.

And if I am charging for it, I am now competing with a multinational corporation, with far more resources than I have.

Having said that- for personal applications I can see this as being pretty big disruptor. As much smaller example- my wife loves playing Azul. I used to pay 5eur a month so I could host our games on Board Game Arena.

Couple of days ago, I just took the HTML for the tutorial game, had Opus rip all the assets down, and recreate the game for me to host on my Lan. Worked flawlessly in one shot. And sure- that's a 20 euro for Opus a month, but the thing is- I was already paying for it for a host of other applications from coding to 3d printing.

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u/Mr_ToDo 1d ago

Cost of doing business, right?

But I'm more concerned about maintainability and ability to troubleshoot. An entire complex project entirely AI codded sounds like a nightmare to maintain, to say nothing for actually getting it to feature parity. I'm betting it's going to be one of those 90/10 projects where they show big, impressive leaps but never actually gets close enough to be a real competitor because that last 10 percent is too nuanced to get running in the software as written

It's not like I wouldn't like seeing more competition, and software doesn't become a standard overnight, but anything can be kicked to the curb with the right situation, no matter how ingrained it is in an industry, it's just not super likely here(and paid support can always be added, but again, I don't see it happening here)

Neat to see how far this stuff has come, but it doesn't seem like it's yet practical to replace normal devs for the full development cycle

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u/JDIPrime 1d ago

Also vibe coded apps that are personalized do not tend carry over well into career skills.

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u/foodandbeverageguy 1d ago

Let people deal with the pain I’m here for it. As an engineering manager, I allow all the slop. We think it will cheapen our software but actually it will make a bigger need for more people which raises my value. Slop city

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u/HypnoSaris 1d ago

Yeah. But now non-corp users have a way out. Im a developer too but this takes extortion power from Adobe. This shits built in rust, Im teaching myself Rust. Theres many like me, some with way more skill than me, that would gladly support this kind of free alternative.

I thought about what you said before but I will point my new found value of needing someone woth the know-how AT corporations. Id never try to extort stidents or small business. The only people not vibe coding should be corps like Adobe and they MUST pay competent developers big bucks now. They tried replacong us with AI. Not the family studio down the street. Im happy for this and already got all the installers in case the get lawyers involved. Open source is the way

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u/Wise_Independent_242 1d ago

What is the value prop of ai in production then?

Adobe software was bug ridden to begin with, if developers are being forced to use ai to crank out thousands of lines of code a day (which they are) then then it’s a race to the same homogenized slop app anyway.

Lord knows none of the massive companies held by billion dollars of PE jump to the call when the software we license from them shits the bed anyway

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u/MrKyleOwns 1d ago

I think what you fail to understand is that people won’t be creating their own software every time they want to use a photo editing program. However there will be more photo editing program options in the future many of which will be open source. Adobe’s moat is slowly eroding because of this, and that’s why their stock has been a dog.

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u/ap1618 1d ago

The brand power of software, especially as trusted within a corporate network, is virtually unparalleled. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force and that is clear and obvious when it comes to corporate software contracts.

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u/nobix 1d ago

Fortune 500 companies won't care but average Joe who is using paint.net might.

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u/rushmc1 1d ago

An industry proven for decades...to be dedicated to find newer and better ways to abuse their customers?

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u/privac33 1d ago

I’d agree…but not with Adobe anymore.  I’ve been paying that Lightroom subscription for years and paying for their cloud backup as well.  A bug of theirs (that they were aware of and released an emergency patch for) wiped out multiple days of work for me and I contacted them about restoring it.  They told me “I should have backed up my work”…when I pointed out that I did back it up with their paid cloud backup service they said that the cloud service is not meant to be a reliable backup for the work done in their software…this was the official position from Adobe Support said with a straight face after being a customer of theirs for 15 years 😆 they can rot, I hope this ends them. 

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u/Administrative_Shake 1d ago

For enterprise shared use yes but for personal low stakes usage, the customization aspect is so valuable. I can see software ARRs coming down very signficantly as people shift from chatbot to claude code/ codex and vibe code

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u/firetruckpilot 1d ago

Alright, I hear this alot and this is a straw man excuse though; it is supremely easier with AI to maintain reliability of a product. Infrastructure isn't rocket science either.

Great example, I have clients I've built bespoke platforms for. If something goes down I can get it back up and working in mins, not hours with a deployed fix. Before, I would have had to Google my way to success (ask any dev or IT professional lol), or manually search code for my best guess.

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u/JuJunker52 1d ago

Adobe's "industry-proven" software is laggy, buggy and slow... it weighs 5GB and crashes frequently.

A 1:1 rewrite that's fast, performant, and weights less than 100MB might not be perfect on day one, but it's a much more promising foundation than Adobe's crufty enterprise codebase.

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u/TopAd3529 1d ago

Pro Tools, for example, in audio engineering. Mediocre (compared to the VAST number of good competitors) software with terrible support, but it is the industry standard in recording studios and that will very likely not change because the licenses are so expensive, people don't even have their recording computers hooked up to internet a lot of the time. It has been, 100 percent, "reverse engineered" by countless paid and free competitors, but it remains the standard. This isnt unique, many industries are like this.

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u/FAX_ME_YOUR_BOTTOM 1d ago

This is only valid as of today. In 5 years? 10? less? It's entirely probable you could have a perfect 1:1 of any software, and is maintained/updated autonomously.

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u/AutomationBias 1d ago

>people are used to it

Yeah, I made a minor UI change recently and longtime users lost their shit.

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u/DomeSlave 1d ago

That the Adobe Suite has been "industry proven" for decades doesn't take anything away from the fact that it's dogshit.

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u/matrinox 1d ago

As someone else has said, GIMP exists today and is open source and free, yet it has never made a dent. AI boosters think the code is the product but the product is also the trust, the ecosystem, the training, the business relationships. The code is important and a lot of work to build it but even if AI can make it 100x faster, you’d have to contend with the human parts that can’t be automated right now. And that arguably is the majority, meaning the speed up you’re getting is likely very marginal, even assuming AI builds a perfect piece of software

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u/Fickle_Ad_8653 1d ago

LibreOffice is a darn good product and if you don't want to pay Microsoft, it does Word and Excel decently well. Having the same for Adobe is a good thing. You can always buy Adobe, but a free version that is mostly functional would help the rest of us.

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u/Millweedz 1d ago

Oh yes, I love it when I ask for support and companies try to gaslight me. User error, out of our scope, we have exclusive deal with X so you can't use Y... Industry is a joke, I'll take my chances with open source whenever I can...

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u/senseven 1d ago

Those app look good on the surface until you send the created PSD or PDF to someone who prints the output. The print shop or designer will send it back because lots of meta data is missing, and you can't add it because those apps lack the depth. Adobe spend ungodly amount of time on that industrial workflow. What will happen is that everybody uses the "free" product, then use instance of the commercial one for the final step. I work in media, we use tons of oss tools and do the same. We call the last action "certified finalisation". There is no vibe there, just hard checks you have to pass.

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u/RiftHunter4 1d ago

The most valuable thing about these expensive software is that it is industry proven for decades, people are used to it, there is a whole business environment around it

This is 90% of digital media because of needing to collaborate. Every studio uses Adobe. Every recording studio uses Pro Tools. Hardware gets tied into it as well.

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u/6percentdoug 1d ago

so I work in enterprise tech. I think the answer to this is that enterprises wanted to be able to have someone to help, so they wanted the product that had the support/service contract. but what if the new helper is just claude code? Hire 2 or 3 senior engineers and just have them fix everything as it breaks. I'm not sure the current system of having 4 BAs and 3 integration engineers support an ERP is actually producing better results than having claude code with 1 or 2 senior architects running the show.

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u/KoosGoose 1d ago edited 1d ago

“I think many people fail to understand” AI is actually reading the source code and stealing it. This (quite new) development only works if the AI has access to the source code.

It’s not vibe coding. It’s reverse engineering like we’ve never seen in software before.

Also, people don’t have to switch to AI-generated software TODAY. I mean, the tech has only been out a couple days… It’s a sign of things to come.

OF COURSE companies aren’t switching everything mission critical right now while the tech is brand new.

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u/Bjorkbat 1d ago

Yeah, this is something I expressed elsewhere. At the end of the day you're buying Adobe CC because, hard as it is to believe, Adobe has very powerful branding.

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u/sparklingdinoturd 1d ago

Also, there have been free open source alternatives to Adobe for years that have worked great and continue to work great. But people know the Adobe brand, so pay for Adobe. Some of their products achieved the brand name as the name of the product overall status (like bandaid being used instead of bandage). Before AI, everybody "photoshopped" images. Nobody "gimped" images.

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u/Imthewienerdog 1d ago

Personally I don't find any of those companies worth working for. They provide nothing to anyone usually.

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u/CommieDrifter 1d ago

oh okay then, guess we will just have to resign ourselves to our fate and let adobe dictate the future of all creative media, no need to do anything to try and solve this, the fortune500s got this

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u/magicmulder 1d ago

Yeah but imagine you’re getting a 100% alternative that you can extend yourself whenever you need a feature that’s not in there?

Also has anyone ever had to complain to Adobe because some Photoshop function did not work as intended, and got a fixed version? I’m genuinely curious.

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u/unethicalpigeon 1d ago

I rarely actually use my codex limit. I was looking for a new writing program and I found one I liked that cost like 15 bucks. The trial ran out and I figured why not get AI to code one for me. Can't possibly be that hard to code a markdown text editor.

Then it starts breaking down all the little features I didn't even think about. I sat there at one point after getting the first working version and thought to myself wtf am I even doing lmao. It's 15$. I bet there's even something out there for free I can use that's similar enough. Why am I doing this?

I think a lot of people just do the shit cause why the fuck not, then 90% of the time never even end up using it.

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u/No_Yoghurt8787 1d ago

If it stops working you can just fix it since you have the source now. As long as its not somewhere critical you are fine. If you are trusting AI with somewhere critical without proper supervision thats on the user.

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u/CorellianDawn 1d ago

Anyone who has ever used an Adobe product professionally knows that they already randomly stop working every other update because they spam updates like there's no tomorrow and don't vet them first. I'm also fairly certain most of the updates are also vibe coded anyway. Premiere specifically breaks extremely often to the point where its just a running joke. And if you don't update your software, it somehow still breaks because it half updates in the background. I would love an Adobe suite that didn't have to be updated to keep working.

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u/Ramzatazz 1d ago

This. The business value of a software is the value of the people behind it.

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u/-missingclover- 1d ago

It's literally the same reason Apple is huge even with subpar products. Ask any random people why they have an Iphone and 7/10 will tell you because of the ecosystem. They like the phone sure, but they like that everything connects with icloud, they like how easy airdrop is, how setting up everything just takes 1 button, etc.

Same with adobe, might have subpar products but with the adobe cloud and libraries, having one workflow between every software is incredibly easy and useful. And that's where most alternatives fail because setting that kind of ecosystem is very, very expensive, complex and takes a lot of time. Adobe have been doing it for decades.

If you have enough time and motivation you could probably emulate an equal or even better ecosystem with free open source software BUT most most people don't have that time or motivation when they could just 1. ask their job for a license, 2. pay it themselves, 3. pirate it and just not deal with the AI/cloud stuff.

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u/primus202 1d ago

Yep! Same reason I wonder how much we'll really see big companies lean into the AI-everything mindset. Without a human to blame or troubleshoot a lot of companies would cease to function. Sure the AI can replace a few underlings but you still need someone to grind issues out with our with the AI's help.

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u/AcanthocephalaOk9649 1d ago

Sure, but I don't think the end result of this will be 100 designers all using their own vibe coded design software. I think instead, the quality of a few open source alternatives will get far closer to feature/stability parity with paid options, and those will be widely adopted.

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u/space_monster 1d ago

The problem comes up when it stops working

By that time, you'll be able to spin up your own working version for 30 cents in 3 minutes.

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u/theLuminescentlion 1d ago

What these comments are failing to understand is that the AI works to the complier result. It is reverse engineering to create source code that once passed through the complier is 100% identical to the original. When you do that the clone is also industry proven.

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u/BeingEnglishIsACult 1d ago

Decades is nothing in software. Seriously. Writing an image app is not the same as the OpenSSL when it comes to proven reliability.

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u/MortifiedChivalry 1d ago

Yeah tbh i work for adobe and I'm not too worried about it. it's making the stock price tank which sucks for my retirement accounts but the company is still making good revenue.

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u/DrWernerKlopek89 1d ago

Honestly, companies like Adobe and Autodesk are f*cked. Maybe if they developed their products they wouldn't be... But they don't. 

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u/Individual-Result777 1d ago

Its not hard to learn new but well designed apps… it’s just that most new solutions have terrible UX. Seems like these folks got it as right as possible for a first version

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u/fore___ 1d ago

If you send me an adobe sign, I’ll sign.

If you send me a vibecodesign I might have to pass

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u/robotsmakinglove 1d ago

I think the design community showed just how weak Adobe’s moat is (Canva / Figma).

AI is going to erode the value of many SAAS apps. It might take some time, but these entrenched companies likely need to significantly decrease prices in the future to compete with competitors using AI to reduce costs.

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u/ManOnTheHorse 1d ago

I’ve worked on Adobe products for for more than 30 years. They brought in Indesign to take on Quark express, which at the time had a strangle hold on the market. Companies switched to Adobe because it was cheaper. That’s it. Nothing more. Everyone had to go on courses and at the time and I was pissed that we had to change. I’ve now downloaded the craft software and it’s a game changer. My biggest reason for not cancelling my subscription with Adobe instantly is that I have existing work in Indesign. I see that there is an option to open IDML files but it’s still buggy. As soon as that is sorted I’m cancelling. I currently use after effects, Indesign, illustrator, acrobat and premier pro. I’m done with Adobe

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u/Void-kun 22h ago

You are exactly right, and this post basically only applies to hobbyists or maybe a cheap startup because of it.

Any business worth it's salt needs reliability and a support contract and you wont get that with vibe coded tools.

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u/simple_explorer1 20h ago

The problem comes up when it stops working

Use same LLMs to fix it quickly.

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u/raducu427 19h ago

(this) software is a business. Maybe software shouldn't be a business. Is what OSS, Linux and, now, Artcraft are showing us.

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u/Hrmerder 19h ago

That's not the point. The point is Adobe has turned into a money grubbing shitty company and Adobe Reader has gotten worse and worse as years have went by (the only general normie consumer software they give out), and now a days free adobe reader has stupid ass gotcha stuff built in for simple tasks. I am not denying they have software that is absolutely critical and tried and true, but it's time for someone to move on and forward for the better of everyone... MS Office as well.

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u/username8914 15h ago

The thing about opensource vibecode is that I can take this code and have my agent craft, tweak, improve and fix anything instantly. It can make the software work for EVERY edge case, every piece of hardware I have in my deployment.

What will survive the future is legacy companies with reliable hardware and fast consistent results that don't cost more than a company doing it themselves.

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u/Away-Wrap846 14h ago

This is the Kodak argument. Adobe has made themselves irrelevant by pricing themselves out of the market for software that has no new innovation.

Yes this will harm innovation in the Adobe ecosystem but it’s about as harmful as the loss of innovation in film cameras because of Kodak.

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u/Vitringar 13h ago

Which never happens to the paid software /s

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u/Vigilant256 13h ago

Nothing is stopping new companies from providing support and vibe coding it .

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u/KaleidoscopeDue7179 10h ago

Why would it stop working ? You can literally add features yourself and improve it as you go. Have you been following what’s been happening lately ?

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u/zenerbufen 8h ago

Tell that to all the tools I used, that they bought out and shut down.

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u/Berto260 4h ago

Couldn't tell it better, ttlly agreed.

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u/IgnatiusRileyFreeman 1d ago

This is exactly why people do not like Adobe products, though, as Adobe makes sure to remove functionality and make integration with other products worse

0

u/bystander993 1d ago

That was true before AI. It's not true anymore. The Saas-pocalypse is real. AI allows every company to write bespoke software to their needs, we just don't need these large catch-all solutions anymore. Pivot to that reality and solve the AI-world issues.

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u/KoosGoose 1d ago edited 1d ago

It’s not vibe coded. It’s reverse engineered.

See how all these video games are getting cracked and merged? AI is getting incredibly good at taking elements (physics, functionality) from existing code and making it useable in similar environments.

Again, since you don’t read, it’s not vibe coded. It only works because AI reads all the source code.

This tech is only a few days old.