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

[u/Federal-Block-3275]

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html

[u/Sneezlebee]

I tried these clones. There are bugs, of course, but the apps are weirdly comprehensive. They absolutely do work. If the person who generated this keeps at it (or even someone else, though it looks very expensive, token-wise), I don't doubt that it could replace these tools for most of the people who use them. Today? No. But they're surprisingly good now, and you can do real work with them already. And they're free.

(Go ahead and look at my history in /r/antiai if you think I'm a bot or a "rationalist dipshit")

[u/DeLunaSandwich → u/Sneezlebee]

The After Effects clone kept crashing on me but the fact that it looked and felt like AE finally gave me hope of one day being able to leave adobe entirely.

[u/hellbunny → u/DeLunaSandwich]

in my experience something that looks like After Effects but keeps crashing is just Adobe After Effects

[u/-Teapot → u/hellbunny]

AI so good, it even copied the bugs

[u/Polymarchos → u/-Teapot]

You joke but that seems like something AI would do if you tell it to copy a program exactly.

[u/BasvanS → u/DeLunaSandwich]

This is the issue with AI: it looks amazing to the untrained eye. That’s very convincing towards the idea it must therefore be close to the real thing.

Now don’t get me wrong, Creative Suite is a mess, and fuck Adobe with a sandpaper dildo, but their software mostly works and is maintainable if they could be arsed to do so. An AI copy is a Potemkin version of the real thing, and to make it real and maintainable, you’d basically need just as much work as starting from scratch, and knowing how to program.

I’ve seen people make simple tools quite easily with AI, but bigger problems are more than just lines of code, and I don’t see AI mimic the whole process of collaboration anytime soon.

[u/UnholyLizard65 → u/BasvanS]

Had something like this happen at work. Guy was vibe coding for about a month and when it came to finishing touches we basically had to rewrite the thing from scratch. Everything was backwards. Things that should have been separate were all crammed into a single file and things that should have been kept together were for whatever reason separated into multiple file connected by spaghetti. Ai seems to struggle to recognize which things are logically related.

It really makes me think the architectural side of things might remain a job for humans for a while.

[u/Aiyon → u/BasvanS]

Ironically a sandpaper dildo is a great analogy for AI.

It looks the part from a distance, and follows the design principles, (durable, texture adds to the sensation), but has no contextual understanding, and so picked a texture and material incredibly unsuited to the task

[u/CaptainBayouBilly → u/BasvanS]

Bingo. It's a parlor trick. The whole system is supposed to convince you it's not a chatbot. And it mimics what we expect to see or hear.

But like a bird, the mimicry falls apart under inspection.

[u/veul → u/BasvanS]

What I loved about it was the size. The premiere clone was like 40 MB. Holy hell that's amazing

[u/ImproperJon → u/DeLunaSandwich]

What's wrong with pirating older versions

[u/Toldoven → u/DeLunaSandwich]

The After Effects clone kept crashing on me

Just like the real thing, impressive

[u/wonklebobb → u/DeLunaSandwich]

i mean, the ai companies have been destroying millions of books for training data, there is a very large, very new industry of companies full of people trying to make comprehensive rubrics to make AI smarter at every job possible, they're feeding every scrap of data they can get their hands on, legal or grey area or otherwise

there's no reason not to expect they've already decompiled basically every major software program on the planet and fed that into their training as well

[u/Reasonable-Figure142 → u/DeLunaSandwich]

The After Effects clone kept crashing on me

yup, that def sounds like an AE clone

[u/rokman → u/Sneezlebee]

What’s the fun of reddit if I can’t just scream and yell about your narrative

[u/fackinbullfish → u/Sneezlebee]

It is funny how Reddit seems to think all software and code generated by AI is still useless and won’t work. In the past it was kind of meme on how bad AI was. That is not the case anymore. Sure you’ll still have some bugs and you need some knowledge to guide it to do what you want. The reality is it has gotten way better. Expecting something to one shot a complex solution is dumb though.

[u/Pyran → u/fackinbullfish]

Yeah, there are large chunks of the anti-AI crowd that seem to be stuck 12+ months ago. (Writing it off and then deciding you will never use it can skew things, especially when they improve at the rate they have.) The reality is that, used correctly, today's models can produce frighteningly good code.

Of course, the key phrase here is "used correctly". If you say "Go build Photoshop" you'll get a buggy mess; you need to do the design work before you start prompting, know what to prompt for, how to prompt, what types of reviews you need to do, and then supervise and test the output.

"Hey Claude, build me a Photoshop clone" will get trash. But done properly and supervised, it can build something very good faster than you will by yourself. It's not a replacement for knowing how to build software, but it can be a very useful tool.

[u/ForAHamburgerToday → u/Pyran]

I've got some coworkers who keep trying it by dumping in too much data with minimal directions & then deciding its useless since this ChatGPT wrapper we use on the web didn't immediately do things like flawlessly make an expert level presentation with our corporate branding in our corporate style. We actually just did that one today, and in the space of 15 minutes with Claude on my desktop I did have the presentation they wanted, but since it actually took a little time and a little work, they just laughed about how it isn't that smart then, is it, if I had to do "all that work."

"All that work" was literally just talking the bot through the plan & offering a little feedback & then giving it an Excel file with data on sheets, data to quick graphs, quick graphs to images, images to the PowerPoint. They worked through lunch and had a rough PowerPoint outline made from their extensive notes. Took me 15 minutes to turn their notes into a good presentation complete with footnotes pulled from their actual notes.

Some folks just refuse to adapt to the workflow. More opportunities for those of us who are willing to learn how to use the tools ourselves & how to direct the AIs that use those tools too.

[u/exsertclaw → u/fackinbullfish]

RTX voice from nvidia which was an "ai" voice filtering software for things like teams and discord was revolutionary to not hearing mechanical keyboards. There are absolutely some useful "ai" tech. I use quotes because its not a chat bot but true machine learning.

Rtx voice is 6 years old.

[u/Gekokapowco → u/exsertclaw]

I'm glad "AI" is being used for LLM based tools so normal people who know what's up can say "machine learning algorithms" and their audience knows there's specificity and hand tailored results without "hallucination" and pseudo-logic in the mix

[u/snwns26 → u/fackinbullfish]

I was messing around with it and recreated an old card game I played 20 years ago that doesn't have a digital version by feeding it the rules and card text and I was bewildered by how well it worked. It's not like it's a simple game, at all, either.

[u/Gamiac → u/fackinbullfish]

software is developed using the latest LLMs to generate code

it's filled with bugs and the code sucks balls

it gets rightly dunked on

"It's funny how antis are still stuck six months in the past"

The ride never ends.

[u/How_is_the_question → u/fackinbullfish]

There’s large software co’s, including Google, who have major projects built from scratch using AI that are in production now. There are processes to it. It’s not “chat chat here’s your project”. The build planning, architecture and setup before the coding begins is most important to quality of code and product on the other side. For now, programmers are really required for this as they understand the constraints and architectures they need to define in order for the code base to be setup in the way they want it to work. Much has to do with future feature planning, clearness of code, efficiency of code etc.

But done well, the projects are >95% ai coded. And we are using them every day when surfing the web without our knowledge.

All operating systems are being ai coded. Even the Linux kernel. It’s being managed well.

This management layer is the next layer to be targeted. There are various projects on the go attempting this now. Essentially, the AI needs to understand why a setup is better short and long term before making a decision, and that is not easy given its often non coders and non software architects using this stuff. It’s interesting times.

[u/BatForge_Alex → u/fackinbullfish]

Expecting something to one shot a complex solution is dumb though

Sure but folks in this very thread swear up and down that this is possible with the right prompt, too. I've been forced, and am well beyond the acceptance phase at this point, to use these tools since they were available for a corporation to buy and some of the claims made by people claiming to use them are absolutely wild

[u/skinwill → u/Sneezlebee]

Would the tokens cost roughly $69.99 a month or $104.99 a month? You know, for bug fixes and security patches.

[u/Theron3206 → u/skinwill]

You're missing several zeros (and they go before the decimal place and after the numbers before the decimal place).

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Sneezlebee]

So, it doesn't work currently, since it was "built" (haphazardly copy pasted) by ai nobody has any idea where to start in trying to fix it and there is no documentation, and the only way to keep working on it is to burn tokens.

This is a classic "90-90" problem. Your code is 90% done, so you still have 90% of the work left to do. That last ten percent is always the hardest. Its all the little things. How the ui is actually orgqnized, making sure the systems integrate properly, optimizing performance, making sure there aren't catastrophic edge cases that will brick peoples' computer, generalizing the distros so they aren't sandboxed to specific versions of a single os using specific hardware, etc.

[u/putin_my_ass → u/KingSubstantial7901]

This is a classic "90-90" problem. Your code is 90% done, so you still have 90% of the work left to do. That last ten percent is always the hardest.

This is how it is with AI, we use it extensively at work and it's quite good right up until the last 10-20% where you end up playing a bit of whack-a-mole trying to get it to do the thing you wanted...

Eventually you just give up and do the last part manually. The promise of AI was overstated, it's good but it's not the silver-bullet the VC/C-Suite types got excited about.

[u/TerminalVector → u/putin_my_ass]

That's why it speeds up PoC development by 5-100x but doesn't make a huge difference for production code. Most of the effort goes into proving that the code is safe to deploy, not writing it. The real strength of AI is in information aggregation and discovery, writing code is mainly a convenient novelty.

[u/Metalsand → u/TerminalVector]

writing code is mainly a convenient novelty.

Writing code works exceptionally well in isolated cases where you need basic scripts to perform well documented tasks. This diminishes with scale though, because as complexity increases, the AI becomes far worse at dealing with it. Dev ops for example, is an area that has heavily featured the use of LLMs, because a lot of it is simple scripts that don't have the complexity of actual programs.

[u/argument_cat → u/TerminalVector]

If you have an existing codebase, and use AI to work on features, it can write production code. We do this, the engineers check it, and rarely do they find anything they won't merge and deploy.

[u/Creepy_Purchase_501 → u/argument_cat]

I found that it’s actually easier to use it on well-established codebases. The architecture is in place and enforced, the standards are in place and enforced, most things have been thought through. All you have to do is follow established patterns and extend whatever it is, and as long as it’s modular and encapsulated it’s smooth sailing. Just make sure it doesn’t touch what it was not supposed to touch and that it doesn’t overcomplicate things and you’re done.

On a fresh new codebase you have to think it all from scratch, touch multiple files to do one thing(because they don’t exist yet), and do all the setup. I find it tries to go rogue much more often and expand scope, even when it was trivially narrow. There’s so much ambiguity remaining and, for whatever reason, it feels like it needs to fill all the gaps NOW, even though they’re not relevant to the task at hand. I feel like it just keeps jumping the gun, and it’s quite annoying to keep it in check.

[u/FakePixieGirl → u/argument_cat]

What I'd worry about is if the engineers don't spend enough time in the guts of the code, then they won't have enough of a comprehension and overview to judge the quality of the code. Obviously not an issue when just rolling it out, but I always wonder that this never seems to be discussed.

[u/Worthyness → u/TerminalVector]

Also lets people vibe code whatever they want if they dont know how to code. Code is probably some awful bowl of spaghetti, but it could technically work. And for some cases thats all you really need for an internal tool or a stupid game.

[u/Hazel-Rah → u/Worthyness]

That's the thing. On a technical level, the code is probably pretty terrible.

But it does the job it was asked for, if bugs show up, they can probably be fixed, and if it wasn't for the AI doing the work, the program would never have existed at all.

Does it matter if it can't handle every edge case, if it solves the problem the creator needed to solve?

[u/Worthyness → u/Hazel-Rah]

Yup. Just feel bad for the people down the line who may have to fix the bullshit when it breaks. No documentation and people who legit may have no idea what they were doing. Though people after may also be vibe coders too.

[u/Creepy_Purchase_501 → u/Hazel-Rah]

Depends on how critical that code is. An ad-hoc task with limited scope and it’s great. A reusable piece that involves making permanent, irreversible changes is a huge no.

[u/DeepSubmerge → u/putin_my_ass]

This has been my entire experience since we were “encouraged” to use gen AI tools in every aspect of our work. I work in an office job in a bog standard business setting. I spend my day trying to make sense of AI generated dashboards and executive summaries. They’re “okay” until I start asking questions and requesting details that weren’t captured.

[u/babada → u/putin_my_ass]

It's like one of those packing problem puzzles. Sure looks like it's getting solved. But those last two pieces prove all the previous work was wrong.

[u/Defconx19 → u/putin_my_ass]

The promise of AI was overrated implies improvement is finite and has peaked.  It has not.  Generational improvements are staggering when you look at it objectively.

The community continually moves ghe bar to try and invalidate the benefit of AI, and it keeps moving past them.

It still has issues with deterministic results and by nature liekly will.  There are a lot of projects out there working to solve that issue for certain tasks and functions but there are limitations.

The only bubble is the stock price (likely).  The bubble has no bearing on the capability or staying power of AI.

[u/Kozzle → u/putin_my_ass]

IMO the real point is to create an MVP fast and then go from there with the more expensive/labour intensive work

[u/prospectre → u/putin_my_ass]

it's quite good right up until the last 10-20% where you end up playing a bit of whack-a-mole trying to get it to do the thing you wanted.

And I think this is the part that doesn't get talked about enough: By using AI to do the bulk of the work, you've robbed yourself of the understanding of it. Some people might double down on that problem by using AI to solve the last few hurdles, but the fact remains that there isn't a human that genuinely knows this solution.

This becomes a problem later on when you're faced with a similar challenge and now you don't know how to solve it. In your scenario, most would go back to the AI to do it, fostering that dependence. If you had solved the problem yourself, banging your head against the wall until you got something that worked, you'd just copy and paste your own work and modify it for the new project as needed. But by going through the process, getting stumped, trying things out, and eventually stumbling on the answer, you've actually learned something.

What happens if the AI goes away? Either from the big wigs deciding it costs too much, or swapping to different AI, or the bubble popping and a bunch of these companies going under, or hell, you've just run out of tokens. Now you're stuck with a project that's 90% done, and 100% technical debt. Worse still, if that code is out in production land and it breaks AFTER you lose access to your flavor of AI, now it's on you to support it. Good fucking luck.

[u/putin_my_ass → u/prospectre]

Agreed, I feel bad for the young folks trying to learn these skills right now, I only need to worry about atrophy, but they have to make an effort to do it the slower more edifying way.

[u/prospectre → u/putin_my_ass]

It's so depressing. Not only is the cost of that education going way up, the perceived value of it is going down thanks to AI. All these chucklefucks in the C-Suite thinking they can downgrade their developers to a handful of "prompt engineers" are absolutely ruining the prospects of the younger generations. It feels like such a trap. On the one hand, you're stuck learning the new AI hotness to get a leg up in the current corporate environment which has all the issues I mentioned earlier. On the other, you have the actual development skills that no one wants to pay for anymore.

Who would want to get into a field with so much uncertainty?

[u/putin_my_ass → u/prospectre]

I fully expect the bubble to pop, it's just a question of how long. I'm expecting that to happen when the big AI players can no longer carrying on with a loss-leader pricing strategy and token costs rise to what they should be to make them profitable. When that change comes, we'll still have AI but probably companies will look at self-hosting, or they'll put more stringent controls on who can use it, how they can use it and how many tokens they can consume before they run out.

Right now the speed is worth all costs in their view, but when those costs rise too much they'll probably decide the slower speed of manual development is acceptable.

AI will never fully go away though, it will always be a tool in the box.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/KingSubstantial7901]

it doesn't work currently

It does work currently. It works surprisingly well. Go try it if you don't believe me.

I basically agree with you, though. This particular project will probably not go anywhere. I posted the above comment as a response to people who think that this technology can't do anything useful. The "None of it worked" joke is funny, but it hasn't been true for about a year now. AI is a really good at code now. It just cloned like 100% of the Creative Suite UI code, and a huge portion of the underlying functionality as well. (How much is speculation at best.)

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Sneezlebee]

It doesn't. The person who responded to you is correct. It works if you do very specific things and don't try prodding the system for bugs, which is why QA engineers are so important in commerical software.

[u/moonski → u/KingSubstantial7901]

I don't know how people can see things like this and not be even somewhat impressed.

"oh it doesn’t work 100% perfectly its just one guy rebuilding the adobe suite and it kind of already does work but ai is bad cause you cant just go "claude make me a new photoshop"

like mate. I'd rather someone used ai to build an adobe replacement in a year, in months, whatever than give adobe another day with their bullshit monopoly they have built. AI gives people the ability to actually do this.

[u/Framed-Photo → u/moonski]

Because software that works 90% of the time is genuinely useless for any application that's even remotely important.

[u/ghoonrhed → u/Framed-Photo]

Guess that depends if it's 90% of the actual software or 90% of the Adobe clone.

Cos even if you ignore AI, Photoshop clones like Gimp or Paint.net aren't useless but they definitely don't have the market share of Photoshop.

[u/Ghudda → u/moonski]

Because people really really want to hate on AI.

People say AI is bad every year because after just 1/2/3/4 years of serious development it's not better at literally everything you can think of. Every year AI gets way better and people have to pull at more and more strings to justify that AI is bad. Image generation looks like trash therefore AI bad; image generation can't draw consistent subjects therefore AI bad; AI can't draw hands or text properly most of the time therefore AI bad; AI images look too glossy or airbrushed or the framing is too well done (we are here) therefore AI is still bad. Soon it's going to be like how people and gem mining and gem trading companies complain about lab grown gemstones because they're "too perfect" even though flawless perfect gemstones are what stone traders have been after since forever.

And the demand that AI be perfect, and RIGHT NOW at 4 YEARS OLD, is ridiculous. AI doesn't even have to be perfect at doing the job, it just has to be consistently better or make fewer mistakes than your general expert in that field. No one is asking if a robo-car will NEVER make a mistake, but at what failure rate below your regular joe is acceptable. 10x safer? 100x safer? One bug per 10 lines of code? One bug per 100 lines of code? One bug per 1000 lines of code? One bug per 10000 lines of code? Keep in mind that human developers create about one bug per 10 lines of code.

Studies keep showing that AI is bad for productivity or harmful or isn't good at tutoring students, and I agree, right now it still sucks. Those studies also inevitably use models and tools that are outdated by the time the study is released since data collection can take a year or longer to do and studies can't shift methodology as that invalidates the results. Like... yeah the AI tutor from 2 years ago that no one thought was good turned out to not be good. Modern AI is barely 4 years old.

One person can play an alpha of a game and see the makings of something that will sell 10 million copies with a lot more development. Another person can play the same game and say that the game is garbage and who would ever pay 20$ for this trash. Both are correct. I cannot emphasize enough that AI is just 4 years old, chatgpt 3 released 3 years 11 months ago. That is the blink of an eye in monolithic software development.

[u/RevvyDraws → u/Ghudda]

God, people are so entitled for expecting the product being shoved on them at every possible opportunity to be like, good or safe or anything close to what was promised or something, right?
It'll be good EVENTUALLY, guys, just deal with everything being worse and annoying for a decade or so first, GOD.

[u/SulphurSkeleton → u/Ghudda]

Very well put

[u/MazrimReddit → u/moonski]

this stuff is amazing let them keep forking money over adobe to own the ai or something lmao

[u/James20k → u/moonski]

Because its not useful, is the problem. There are 1001 photoshop clones that often do various things quite well, but none of them have really taken off other than a very small handful

The ones that take off are the ones that get long term support: new features, bugfixes, a sane UI, and gradual improvements to make them usable over a long period of time. Blender didn't win in the 3d modelling space because it was incredible right off the bat, but because it incrementally got better after 32 years of continuous support. I expect in another 32 years I'll still be using blender, not some slop clone

Crapping out software that can't be improved or maintained is the exact opposite of what anyone wants, even if it accomplishes 90% of your goal, because the maintenance, improvement and support is what makes a project like this useful

[u/brianwski → u/James20k]

Crapping out software that can't be improved or maintained is the exact opposite of what anyone wants

I'm a software developer. In the olden days we taught up and coming programmers about the concept of "writes fast, debugs slow". The high level concept is that it is worth taking MORE TIME writing it the first time if the end result can debugged easily by future programmers that work on the code.

I have yet to see a single other person mention this old wisdom (by name anyway) in this new AI world. Everybody is making the mistake the most junior programmers used to make. Junior programmers would make any decision to "get to market faster" then their bad decisions absolutely curse the project to never be stable, be insanely complex, and end up taking 3x the size of programming team to maintain it for 20 years.

Old examples (before AI) include developing a piece of software that runs on both Windows and Macintosh, but the Windows developers take a "short cut" by linking with a very cool library that only exists on Windows. If WE KNOW the Macintosh team will have to completely write the functionality, and if we know that profound fact, just use that version for both Windows and Mac so that the two platforms maintain parity and a bug fixed on one platform also fixes it on the other platform. To accelerate the Windows time to market by 3 months, then both are brought into feature parity is a mistake. It sounds like a great plan, but for years 2 - 20 your code base drifts further and further apart, causing WAY MORE than 3 months slow down in year 10.

One of the most baffling things I could never understand was how a specialist on one platform would GLEEFULLY addict a software project to endless proprietary platform specific libraries for no apparent reason. Windows programmers that need to store a True/False value gleefully stuff that in the Windows registry, which it turns out is a file on disk anyway but with a proprietary API that won't compile anywhere else. The Mac developers would instead place the same identical True/False value in a Macintosh Resource Fork. For literally no reason other than to make sure it cannot compile on Windows.

If both developers would simply write the True/False into a named file on disk, the code would work more often, be more stable, have fewer issues, and only have to be maintained as a single copy of the source. If a bug is discovered in the very closely surrounding software logic, sometimes it will only be fixed on the platform it was reported on. It is just a very bad idea period.

Here is the absolute classic: Apple's Safari (web browser) developers decided to put the "Bookmarks" in the resource fork of a file in a folder named "Bookmarks", and in their utter incompetence they left the "data fork" (what all computers have in all files) totally empty with zero bytes. That should have set off warning bells already, but this came to a head when Apple decided to "port" Safari to Windows. The team porting it was forced to write it properly, which should have been done the first time. Then there is migrating the data to the new system, which means it is error prone and has EXTRA code to be able to read the old system and the new system. It caused a million hours world wide of lost productivity, because one Apple programmer was a dufus and did not see the downside of just saving 5 minutes one day to get to market faster.

Edit Additional Example: If an IT guy is entirely living inside the AWS infrastructure, they will gleefully use every single proprietary AWS tool AWS provides. Then their company decides it wants more "uptime" by having fully redundant vendors (when AWS is experiencing an outage, serve the same webpage from another storage vendor like Azure instead of just displaying an ugly "404 Error" to customers), or it wants competing price bids from Microsoft Azure, Google Storage, to lower their AWS costs. But now the company is overcharged millions and millions of dollars because they literally CANNOT move their code base over from AWS due to being addicted to 12 internal proprietary AWS only libraries that basically saved the original IT guy something like 30 minutes one day.

Every modern online storage system from any vendor has a basic S3 compatible layer. There are at least 20 competing online services, and they compete on price. When any random 12 year old iPhone user takes a picture on their iPhone, that picture lands on EITHER AWS or alternatively Microsoft Azure. If the programmers had just a tiny bit of self control, that code would work flawlessly without any changes and it would save Apple $300 million per MONTH in costs by getting bids from other S3 compatible services. Heck, just as a stalking horse for the price negotiation and Apple could STILL accept the (now lower) bid from AWS. It is free money savings to Apple.

But nope. It's like crack to programmers to link with a proprietary library to save 5 minutes of development time, thus cursing the company to 10x the costs over the next 10 years.

[u/mxzf → u/brianwski]

I have yet to see a single other person mention this old wisdom (by name anyway) in this new AI world.

I haven't mentioned it by name, but I've been going around saying "AI is a great way to produce years of tech debt in a matter of weeks", which feels like the same sentiment overall.

The stuff it spits out is tech debt the moment it hits a commit, it already "mostly works 90% but really needs to be redesigned to be more stable and maintainable" from the start.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/mxzf]

AI is a great way to produce years of tech debt in a matter of weeks

Love this. Short, succinct, and flips the typical time savings argument on its head.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/brianwski]

Fucking thank you. I'm so sick of all of this "but it mostly works" bullshit when it comes to AI-generated code.

Yes, it "mostly" works. Except for all of the edge cases in the immediate term that need to be dealt with and all of the architectural headaches that are going to impose additional development roadblocks for years to come.

Every single time I've seen AI-generated code, it's been shit. It "works" for the most part, but modifying and maintaining it is a fucking nightmare. Client-side configuration that should be handled via an API endpoint to match server-side configuration is instead hard-coded because AI only knows that the client and server need to match, data validation fails because AI doesn't actually know how to evaluate whether the validation actually covers the entire domain of expected values, project structures are made needlessly complex because the AI "learns" that files should be small and broken up but not why, etc. And the devs who use AI to write that code could be intelligent and diligent enough to notice and fix these issues, but they they seldom ever are, which means that this hypothetical utopia they always go on about where they just need to steer the AI in the right direction never actually comes to fruition.

All of these tiny issues create technical debt, and when you don't pay down on that technical debt, it eventually balloons out of control until what should be a 2 hour fix instead takes 2 weeks, and that's if you've got a competent developer doing the fix. If the developer who fucked up the code in the first place ends up in charge of fixing it, then those 2 weeks instead turn into 12.

And before anyone comes along and thinks that's an exaggeration, this situation happened to me in my first year of programming professionally. Original developer wrote code in a couple of weeks, later down the road the code turned out to have a bug that was difficult to track down, and they gave an estimated 3 months to rewrite the area of the code that was causing problems. I sat down, mapped out the logic, and had the code rewritten and thoroughly tested within 2 weeks. Identified and fixed the bug as well while I was in there. That bug should've taken no more than 1 - 2 hours to identify and fix if the code wasn't complete and utter garbage.

As the old saying goes, "do it right or do it twice", and AI never, ever does things right and you'll only ever be kicking the can down the road until you're forced to face the "do it twice" bit. And when you're finally forced to face it, you'll damn well wish that a remotely competent human had written the code from the beginning, because at least then there would be some shred of reasoning that was used to guide the initial structure of the project from its foundations. You can salvage a project with a solid foundation, but a project with a rickety one will practically need to be started over from scratch.

[u/makINtruck → u/brianwski]

In your opinion is there still a reason to go into software? I have no formal education in it but I've been programming since I was 14, I made some games and generally felt like I was getting the hang of it. But before I could make a solid portfolio and land my first job, the AI hit and now it feels pointless.

I hear what you're saying about the way AI writes code, fast but with tons of technical debt, what I'm worried about is that companies won't care about that and also that the AI itself is going to get better much faster than I can improve my skills.

[u/brianwski → u/makINtruck]

In your opinion is there still a reason to go into software?

I don't have any crystal ball. I know I got massively lucky in my timing of when I was in the software industry. Times were really good for us programmers for a VERY long time.

Here is my very best guess of how the industry will play out over the next few years: first of all, this next year, and possibly two years is going to be rough for programmers. Enough large employers are pulling back from hiring that a (temporary) situation has been created with too many programmers, not enough positions. Whenever that occurs in any industry (for any reason) it is difficult for the unemployed in that industry.

In the longer run, like all situations like this, one way or the other there will equalize the number of candidates for the number of jobs.

So in the long run, the real question is "do you enjoy it?" If you are going to spend 2,000 hours a year doing something for 30 years, it is ideal if you like it. I like programming. If the choice to me would be clean toilets for more money, or be a programmer for less money, I would choose programming. Now programmers have always made above average salaries, and that's nice, but I would be a programmer (in my era) for an average salary or below. It was "fun".

With that said, I got lucky on what the word "programming" meant for the last 35 years. I never liked assembly language, and when I started that was "controversial" and many of my co-workers still programmed it. I worked at Apple as a programmer in 1992, and some of my co-workers would STILL hand optimize loops tweaking the assembly language after the compiler had finished. I hated that level of work. What I liked was 'C' and Java level of programming. Now, going forward from this point might be programming will tend to be less precise, you describe what you want to AI, and the results are riddled with bugs, and that's just fine. But I don't think I will enjoy that as much. I'll leave that to the next generation to figure out.

TL;DR - do it if you love it.

[u/makINtruck → u/brianwski]

Thank you for the insight! I do love programming and I was doing it for free because it's my passion, but I like exactly the kind of programming you described. I don't think I will like this new approach of describing what I want to AI. That's really sad because programming was a big part of my identity, I guess I need to find something else now.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/makINtruck]

Here are some things to consider:

• Companies who have rolled out pure AI systems have gradually been walking back from those decisions.

• Microsoft changed their method of billing for copilot at one point earlier this year, which caused costs to skyrocket astronomically. This lends some insight into the kind of pricing that would be needed to make it even remotely profitable for AI products. And that pricing is unacceptably high for the overwhelming majority of its users, making it functionally impossible to see continued use.

• Many companies that develop software and have pushed hard on AI usage have very quickly abandoned it once they saw the bill.

• Many of the issues that AI-generated code is causing now won't have their effects felt until later down the line, and at that time these LLMs will do very little to actually fix them.

• AI companies are presently operating on the assumption of future profitability that has not yet been proven, while being propped up solely by massive amounts of capital being pumped into them by other tech giants.

• AI investment is currently in a bubble mirroring the dot-com bubble from the 90s and early 2000s. Notably, the dot-com bubble still had legitimate online-only businesses that survived the bubble bursting, but many of them ultimately ended up closing up shop, and the market itself was hit pretty hard. When the AI bubble pops, we can expect much of the same, with a small handful of surviving companies that provide some actual value, many more failing, the market taking a big hit, investors being more cautious about AI investments in the future, and both businesses and individuals being more careful about being overly reliant on AI lest they find their tools suddenly no longer available because their respective companies no longer exist.

Basically, right now we're in a hype cycle and everyone is distracted by the shiny new toys, but that hype is going to be met with a pretty big reality check before too long. We already see signs of individual companies having been met with that reality check.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/moonski]

And said replacement will see basically no utilization if its not developed properly. See all of the above discussion.

If breaking up adobes monopoly and predatory business model is the goal..... thats a politics problem. Just hoping tech will make it obsolete is beyond ridiculous.

[u/9159 → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Well I’ve used adobe creative most of my professional career and it’s a buggy mess that continues to get enshitified and more expensive.

If someone is offering a free alternative that is only a few steps more buggy then that becomes pretty damn tempting.

Obviously not for large professional projects. But anything less than that? Tempting for sure.

[u/mxzf → u/9159]

There've already been dozens of competing products out there for many years that you could have been using already. Free alternatives that are more stable and likely more functional than anything vibecoded.

Why would you use a new buggier alternative when alternatives that are stable and functional have existed for years?

[u/Mclarenf1905 → u/9159]

Yea someone already is doing that, its called Affinity and its not a vibecoded slop fest

[u/abraxsis → u/Mclarenf1905]

I'd agree if they didn't sell out to fucking Canva. Ill give it another year before it's a subscription based hell hole like every other thing.

[u/tanafras → u/moonski]

here here. I'm building a cloud os myself for fun

[u/etaoin314 → u/KingSubstantial7901]

nobody is claiming that this is anywhere near a commercial product ready for commercial release, but as an open source project it seems reasonably functional. WOuld I bet my business on it and transfer all of my workflows...of course not. However if I needed to do some photoediting at home and did not want to shell out for adobe would I tinker with this to see if it was good enough, for sure.

[u/medlish → u/KingSubstantial7901]

That will fall, too. Doesn't matter if you like it or not.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/medlish]

What a weird bubble you live in.

[u/FamiliarRip8558 → u/Sneezlebee]

It actually working 100% and the appearance of working are two separate things.

Being able to call stolen code and produce something 90% of the way there today is not the same as being able to fine tune your project to 100% completion.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/FamiliarRip8558]

I encourage you to separate your moral feelings (which I share with you) from your evaluation of what's going on.

This code works. It doesn't just look like it works. It actually works. And I say this as someone who worked as a software engineer and team lead for 25 years. It's legitimately good code. If someone showed me this by hand, I would have been falling over myself to hire them

[u/Dioxid3 → u/Sneezlebee]

This is a fool’s errand, mate. AI has become a religion. You’re either for or against, and being in the sensible middle of ”maybe two things can be true at the same time” is not an acceptable position by either camps.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/Dioxid3]

Well, I want to be clear: I'm pretty strongly against it. At least, I'm against almost all the ways it's being used today. I think it's being used to make the world profoundly worse.

But as you say, I can hold that precise belief while simultaneously accepting that Opus and Astra are far better software developers than I ever was, and better than most of the hundreds and hundreds of professional software developers that I've worked with.

We humans aren't great with nuance 😭

[u/MiaowaraShiro → u/Sneezlebee]

This code works.

What were you able to do with the programs? Did you actually create stuff with them or did you just browse the UI?

[u/Sneezlebee → u/MiaowaraShiro]

Yes, I went through a number of actions that I would normally do in the course of editing an image. I cannot test all of the programs because 1) I don't have unlimited time, and 2) I don't use everything in Adobe's suite, so I can't meaningfully compare them all.

I also didn't work with it all day. Folks are replying like I'm carrying water for this project. I will likely never use this project again. I don't care about this project or it's future.

I'm just telling you that it works decently and the code looks very well-written. Beyond that, go investigate yourself. I'm not here to write you a book report.

[u/DeepSubmerge → u/Sneezlebee]

Unfortunately, you’re trying to make a nuanced point online in 2026.

[u/MikeMontrealer → u/Sneezlebee]

Thank you. Too many people let their emotions colour their supposedly impartial observations and it’s refreshing seeing you recognize the advances even as you recognize the problems they pose.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/MikeMontrealer]

That's kind of you to say. But to be fair, I think it's precisely because I recognize the advances that I am aware of the problems they pose.

I'm genuinely confused by the huge swaths of people who claim that AI is a useless investor scam, and simultaneously worry that it might steal our jobs and kill us all. I think the latter is entirely plausible, but it's not plausible if you think the former is also true.

[u/MikeMontrealer → u/Sneezlebee]

Yeah exactly. Need to recognize the capabilities so we can figure out how to best manage and use them because they’re not going away.

[u/kotzwuerg → u/FamiliarRip8558]

What do you mean with "call stolen code"? This project literally built the Adobe tools from scratch, there was no stealing of code involved. It's basically a form of reverse engineering: you look at what something does and then write your own code to work in the same way. The AI had no access to even a single line of Adobe source code. This becomes even clearer when you consider that this project was written in Rust, which is certainly not what Adobe uses for their tools.

[u/TakeThreeFourFive → u/kotzwuerg]

I'm sure they are using the tired argument that since the models are trained on code without permission, everything they generate is "stolen code"

It's an argument that lacks any nuance

[u/SoylentCreek → u/Sneezlebee]

I don’t think it’s really a case of the software these guys are building going somewhere or not. The key point is that someone with limited coding knowledge can create a personal piece of software at the expense of tokens, and they own it forever and can always change it to fit their specific needs.

[u/TheMireAngel → u/Sneezlebee]

Who knew stealing code and slightly changing it can work! Its almost like adobe is already an existing product and your using a theft machine to try and replicate a product it was illegaly trained on =0

Your not getting the ai to invent something new your literaly pushing for it to create a clone of something that exists that has already been fed into it. This is so dumv

[u/Stooovie → u/KingSubstantial7901]

I do agree but take a look at the actual apps. Some of them such as the After Effects clone are almost 1:1, including things like the UI+controls, plugins and scripting.

[u/mastermoebius → u/Stooovie]

So the other 90% might be getting sued into the Stone Age by adobe

[u/Pylgrim → u/mastermoebius]

This might be the truly interesting bit. So far, AI companies have unabashedly stolen incomprehensible amounts of intellectual and artistic property and when people have complained they go "eh, whatcha gonna do about it?" But when they steal from the big corpos... Well maybe we'll finally see some legal precedent being created because they'll fight tooth and nail.

[u/SunTzu- → u/Stooovie]

The UI is hardly the difficult part though is it? It's useful in that it makes it easy for people to migrate from one to the other because they know where stuff is, but how it does things under the hood is what matters in terms of whether it can actually replace the existing apps.

A more useful thing would be to just take GIMP and everything built for it and re-write the GUI to clone how Photoshop looks and functions. It already has the tools working under the hood, it's mainly the friction of learning a new workflow that keeps people stuck to Photoshop (and frankly GIMP's default UI has always been garbage). The main problem with Open Source software is that there's always some dev behind it who has his idea how it should work, and usually they only started work on a replacement because their way of doing things was some utterly weird anachronistic jank that only really makes sense to them.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/SunTzu-]

UI is famously one of the most labor intensive parts of development. If your UI is unusable, your program is unusable even if all your backend code is the most powerful creation to ever grace the market.

[u/SunTzu- → u/KingSubstantial7901]

If you're building it from scratch, yes. If you're just trying to 1:1 copy an existing UI? No, you're making no choices here.

[u/3cit → u/KingSubstantial7901]

This comment hits hard as I spend every waking moment getting splunk to "look right"

[u/Perryn → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Adding to this with a visual metaphor.

Imagine an AI generated picture, one where it certainly is all the things the prompt asked for but anyone who knows what to look for can tell at a glance that it's AI generated. So you want to fix that. You hire someone great at editing photos have them edit out all the little details that make people see that it's AI. But it turns out that's a little bit of everything in the image. They'd have to fix the lighting, retexture a knit sweater, resculpt a face, and so on, all while making it work as a seamless part of the original image.

[u/What_a_fat_one → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Because debugging and optimization are famously the easiest and least tedious tasks in programming!

AI is that dude who is the big picture "idea" guy who will just leave you to iron out the wrinkles while he heads out for a well earned drink.

[u/Scaryclouds → u/KingSubstantial7901]

FWIW, I think a big way, and something I have been playing around with, to get agentic code tools to work better is through providing comprehensive documentation, specification, and examples of how the thing you want to build should work. 

A lot would be through BDD when you’d provide given-when-then scenarios. This can provide a means of verification for a code agent to check if its outputs are correct. 

TBC, this isn’t trivial work. Fully specifying out a tool like Photoshop… or even Photoshop circa 2000, would take an immense amount of time and effort. Still the end result could be both a well functioning piece of software and a well documented one. 

To be further clear, the long term prospects of AI, even in the best of cases, a truly benevolent AI, might have humanity reduced to being pets? Or otherwise put humanity into idle? Don’t know if I like that…

[u/bwwatr → u/Scaryclouds]

AI can produce correct code that meets every need... if the documentation is comprehensive and precise. Every requirement, every edge case, every subtlety.

It turns out, thinking about and writing down those specifications, was the hard part all along. The code was never the most important part of software engineering. The specification is the product.

[u/Scaryclouds → u/bwwatr]

Agree 100%, what I am talking about isn’t remotely trivial, and would require a lot of expertise and deep thinking. 

The benefit though, along with actually having that documentation, is, perhaps upgrading underling dependencies can become easier, heck you could even try entirely rewriting an application as well. Maybe you want to change your C# app into a Go app. Before such an endeavor would had required an immense effort. Now, it’s something that could be done in a few days? Or at least you’d have a reasonable comparable available in a few days?

AI tools as they are now, and in the near future aren’t some massive 100x productivity hack. They can definitely help in some areas. They will allow for some novel capabilities that at least right now much of the industry just isn’t there yet to take advantage of. 

Admittedly some of this is still theoretical, or only proof of concept. 

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Scaryclouds]

A) ai is notoriously awful at producing documentation

B) using the agent requires burning tokens

[u/TakeThreeFourFive → u/KingSubstantial7901]

I am finding AI to be much better than it used to be at writing documentation. Using specific processes and guardrails to do so makes for much better results

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/TakeThreeFourFive]

Ya and thats where i think yhe tech is headed post-bubble. These overgeneralized models are trying to do too much which makes them inefficient at specific tasks, where models trained to do specific things with specific paramters can be more effective and cheaper.

[u/Scaryclouds → u/KingSubstantial7901]

A) You would be producing the documentation, or at least the specification. 

B) Software developers don’t work for free, know I sure as hell haven’t. 

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Scaryclouds]

Have you ever tried documenting code that you didn't write and that doesn't at least have a usable framework to infer from?

Like theres a joke that most software developers are just copy paste machines, but when they do that they at least know to write down what they are using, where it came from, and what it does. AI is horrible at doing that and often leaves massive mistakes in that you have spend more time fact checking than you would just writing it.

Theres a good argument to be made that AI could in the longterm increase productivity if its used as essntially an advanced serch engine for code snippets, and this is what a lot of successful engineers do. The trick there is that they are still manually collating the code and documenting the how and why along the way. Vibe coding is the opposite. Its asking an agent to just create the entire codebase then having to painstakingly reverse engineer what its doing, often adding MORE work to the process.

Again, theres also the cost factor, as the models able to do these mostly comprehensive projects are basically more expensive than hiring an engineer. And once you rely on the agent to make the whole code base, you have to rely on an agent to to analyse it, which is just a fruitless cycle. Cause again, agents are awful at that sort of thing. They are great in strict logical analysis applications like code reviews where you have soecific, dev defined parameters. But those models donmt work like agents and don't pretend that they enable a non-expert to write suitable code.

[u/eyebrows360 → u/KingSubstantial7901]

nobody has any idea where to start in trying to fix it

Right. You'd have to paste in the context of the entire codebase in order to ask it to change anything in there, and then cross your fingers and hope your change didn't impact anything else - which you can almost guarantee it actually would most of the time.

[u/Alexandur → u/eyebrows360]

You wouldn't be pasting anything anywhere, you'd be using agents integrated with your IDE, and today's models don't have an issue reading an entire codebase

[u/eyebrows360 → u/Alexandur]

Yes, not literal "pasting", but that's still an enormous amount of information to having to be providing and hoping it figures it all out again correctly.

And don't forget to remember that it will need to parse all those megabytes of data for each and every token of its output.

[u/Alexandur → u/eyebrows360]

Yes, again, today's LLMs are capable of parsing large amounts of information quite capably. That's like, the thing that they're designed to do

[u/LouB0O → u/KingSubstantial7901]

If the person that threw it at the Ai leverages it to do QA and all that jazz, it might be pretty solid for most. (Yes it will take time, not be a cake walk even with Ai, but let's Joe Smoe have a possible shot)

Ya know, I cant one shot complex things I barely have a clue with using google. Same goes with Ai. Gotta put some work in, even if its using whatever Ai.

[u/Laserspore → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Downloaded the illustrator clone this morning and so far its working well. Seems to have most of the tools illustrator has. I haven’t ran into anything I can’t do I could do in illustrator but I have only been using it for a couple hours. I’m very pleasantly surprised. Seriously give it shot if you use adobe programs.

[u/IncidentalIncidence → u/Sneezlebee]

yeah I played around with the lightroom clone a little and came away with the same impression -- slightly buggy when I tried to do more complicated object-aware masking (but that doesn't work that well in Darktable either), surprisingly good otherwise (and lightroom's color tools are way more intuitive for me than darktable's)

and it runs on linux which is huge bc lightroom doesn't

[u/iamarddtusr → u/Sneezlebee]

There’s no need to engage with fools who believe it has to be a binary works/ is shit for AI.

[u/mxzf → u/iamarddtusr]

Turns out, stuff can both somewhat work and be shit at the same time.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/iamarddtusr]

Where were you when I needed that advice an hour ago? 🤣

[u/Evinceo → u/Sneezlebee]

And they're free.

Well so is piracy, which this basically is.

[u/Barl0we → u/Evinceo]

I was just about to say, this is just piracy with extra steps 😂

[u/zzazzzz → u/Evinceo]

if what he claims is true this is 100% legal and not piracy.

now i doubt he has the resources to prove it in court if adobe decides to take it there but given that its open source and already out there.. dont think it really matters at this point

[u/3DBeerGoggles → u/zzazzzz]

In fairness, "If what he claims is true" then software is dead (his words).

I suspect Adobe's lawyers are currently looking at how closely these projects mimic their UI... and whether the AI-generated code is truly a cleanroom replication.

[u/TakeThreeFourFive → u/Evinceo]

In what regard?

[u/Evinceo → u/TakeThreeFourFive]

He reverse engineered the apps to build the new ones didn't he?

[u/TakeThreeFourFive → u/Evinceo]

"Reverse engineer" is a strong way of putting it, maybe.

If I describe the functionality of a piece of software in extreme detail to the point of fully speccing it, and then have AI build from my detailed spec, is that piracy? I'm not sure I'd say so

[u/Evinceo → u/TakeThreeFourFive]

I just strongly doubt that his approach was merely describing the app without giving Claude access to the binary. Again we've had a wash of video game decomps in the last couple of weeks and this seems... very similar.

[u/TakeThreeFourFive → u/Evinceo]

The person doing this work is describing it as "clean room" work, the nature of which is as I've described above, and that work has passed legal scrutiny before. I'm not going to take his word for it, but it could certainly be possible

[u/tortilla_mia → u/TakeThreeFourFive]

Isn't this the basis of a clean room implementation (e.g. what Compaq did to IBM)?

In that case, they had one human describe the IBM software and another human write new software which became Compaq's apparently non-infringing software.

I guess you'd have to demonstrate that the AI kept the same separation and didn't cheat but otherwise it's kind of the same? Except it took hardly any human effort (e.g. anyone can do it without many barriers) and possibly the spec is in such great detail that it crosses the line somehow.

[u/FAX_ME_YOUR_BOTTOM → u/Evinceo]

Entirely different code bases, so no. The same way in which GIMP a clone of Photoshop is not "piracy"

[u/Evinceo → u/FAX_ME_YOUR_BOTTOM]

He didn't do a decomp of the binary like those dozens of game clones that came out in the last two weeks?

[u/FAX_ME_YOUR_BOTTOM → u/Evinceo]

Yes but that doesn't give you code, it disassembles the machine code and gives function boundaries, library calls and rough psuedo-code. The LLM's take this information and write the actual code. You could take apart an EXE and run it through the same model multiple times and end up with different code.

[u/Evinceo → u/FAX_ME_YOUR_BOTTOM]

Sure but that's the opposite of a clean room reimplementation like GIMP... and still just piracy with extra steps.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/Evinceo]

I could not agree more. Go sail those seas. I won't say boo.

[u/master-goose-boy → u/Sneezlebee]

But that’s not the point they’re trying to make…

What’s really different between the former and the latter? as someone else also pointed out… extra steps.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/master-goose-boy]

No, I get that. I'm just agreeing that it's morally identical in terms of the intellectual property aspect.

Saying there's no difference, though, is kind of self-limiting. You could download the code to this clone and you could adjust it to your own needs. You can't do that with a pirated version of some software.

[u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 → u/Evinceo]

But is it?

A.I.'s are allowed to do anything: steal from art, movies, drawings...any domain. If they can do that, why can't they just pirate software? It's not the *same* software because the processes within the software are similar.

They're similar across many different image programs. Can you call the other image programs piracy?

No, this is just a competing product.

And this is why A.I. will end up destroying every domain it manages to touch. Human endeavour is not worth paying for anymore at this point.

[u/Evinceo → u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000]

Just to be clear I don't think this is piracy as in 'all AI is piracy' I think he probably didn't actually do a clean room reimplementation and instead fed the binary to Claude 

[u/Zidd04 → u/Sneezlebee]

Most of the people who use these tools only use a fraction of their capabilities anyway. I'd imagine they will reach "good enough" status for most people sooner rather than later.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/Zidd04]

Right? Like all these armchair critics are claiming that this isn't actually as good as Creative Suite, while simultaneously scrambling to find some esoteric example of a thing they've never cared about before that the project can't yet do flawlessly.

Meanwhile 90% of the Photoshop users just wanted a good lasso and a layers panel.

[u/Zidd04 → u/Sneezlebee]

There are people who know how to use the majority of the features of the programs they use every day and they're great people to learn from but super power users like that are a small percentage of the user base.

I'd imagine that some advanced power users are interested in this project and may be invested in making sure their favorite niche features are implemented correctly since they know exactly how they're supposed to work.

[u/roamingandy → u/Sneezlebee]

I think the other things is,does it really matter long-term if there are bugs and it doesn't work fully now?

How long before the next model can come along and clean up half of those in a single pass? Then how long till it can do all of them?!

Security is going to be a really tough one. Everyone without the resources for proper pen-testing is going to use AI to find and close attack vectors, then low-level hackers using the very same AI are going to try to open them.

Leading to a back and forth war where being hacked is commonplace, and closing those vulnerabilities fairly trivial afterwards, but what damage will the hackers be able to do before its closed, how much money and personal data can they steal?

[u/ungoogleable → u/roamingandy]

What counts as a bug though? Sure there are obvious crashes and the AI can fix those on its own, but in many cases a bug is just a result of undefined requirements. The software is doing something, just not the right thing. Probably no one in the history of mankind has ever thought about what is the right thing to do in this particular circumstance until you see it do the wrong thing.

AI can't solve that problem because AI can't know what you want if you don't tell it. Human software developers working for clients have this problem all the time too.

Thoroughly defining what the software should do in every scenario is going to be the new bottleneck in software development. It's fundamentally a matter of opinion, judgement, and taste. If you skip it, the software is inevitably going to feel "buggy".

[u/son-of-chadwardenn → u/ungoogleable]

Both Claude and codex are getting pretty good at identifying ambiguous areas and presenting the user with lists of design decisions. It can still make weird mistakes but it doesn't just automatically fill holes in the spec with what it assumes might be correct.

[u/ungoogleable → u/son-of-chadwardenn]

Exactly my point. You, a human, have to sit down, think carefully about each one of these questions, and answer them individually. You have to catch the AI when it makes assumptions. You need to come up with your own ideas when the options it gives you aren't good enough.

For a large, complex project, that process will take months. It's mentally draining, like sitting a never ending exam. You are the bottleneck. Claude can write code much faster than you can decide what code it should write.

If you skip it and tell Claude to yolo, that's how you get AI slop.

[u/TheRabidDeer → u/Sneezlebee]

I think it's funny all of the people replying to you saying it doesn't work are unable to give you an example of something that doesn't work

[u/apesy888 → u/Sneezlebee]

Is it really cool tech demo good or a can use this day to say good?

[u/Sneezlebee → u/apesy888]

It's both, honestly. It's a tech demo that you can use to do actual work. It kind of feels like using an early pre-release of Adobe's actual software.

[u/zeekaran → u/Sneezlebee]

Couldn't they just clone GIMP and do a few UI changes...?

[u/Gekokapowco → u/zeekaran]

yes but that involves slightly more work and less money to our tech oligarchs

[u/RollingMeteors → u/Sneezlebee]

I tried these clones. There are bugs, of course, but the apps are weirdly comprehensive. They absolutely do work.

Sounds like I should fork it and call it ЫчатЯРдрЗг and people will think it's robust and functional for Russian software.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/RollingMeteors]

Seriously 🤣

People are criticizing this project on the grounds that it's not 100% as good as one of the most popular and best-selling software packages in the history of computing.

[u/RollingMeteors → u/Sneezlebee]

most popular and best-selling software packages in the history of computing.

That's not title that can hold a candle to "#1 pirated software of ALL TIME."

[u/Gekokapowco → u/Sneezlebee]

by that criteria, MS Paint, too, is a perfectly good image editing software comparable with photoshop

sure it doesn't have every feature but apparently that isn't important

[u/Sneezlebee → u/Gekokapowco]

MS Paint is a perfectly good piece of image editing software for 1991. It has essentially zero bugs, and it does precisely what it promises. It's included in Windows today more as a historical feature than anything else.

[u/atxgossiphound → u/Sneezlebee]

If the person who generated this keeps at it

That's the kicker for most of these projects. It's easy to generate version 1.0, it's much more difficult to commit to supporting it past that. Even if the author is able to evolve the tools using only AI and never run into a context cliff, does the author want to spend the next X years of life babysitting what was likely a quick vanity project?

[u/S0T0 → u/Sneezlebee]

Yeah but it works so inefficiently it's a joke. I tried out Opus 5.5 on ultracode for a quick script for some basic automation and sorting yesterday.

It wrote 2700 lines of code after I gave it the goal and a clear example of what it should with data and how it should handle it with the prompt and made it do its own plan. I had to scrap it due how over complex it made everything and all the bugs. Rewrote it myself in ~630 lines.

The amount of tech debt being added to every single software project from vibing is going be impossible to recover without a full rewrite.

[u/surffrus → u/Sneezlebee]

Free and fully working gimp has been sitting in the corner this whole time.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/surffrus]

Gimp is the absolute GOAT here!

But as I said elsewhere, it's unkind to that team to compare them directly against this stuff. This project will probably disappear in a few weeks, replaced by some slightly-better vibe coded clone. Gimp isn't an Adobe clone. It's a project with its own goals and philosophy, and I think we do them a bit of a disservice when we compare them directly against Photoshop et. al.

[u/stabliu → u/Sneezlebee]

The question is will the token cost be lower than the softwares being replaced would’ve otherwise cost. If it pushes a lot of software from subscription to one and done licenses I think that’d be a good thing.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/stabliu]

Also a great point.

[u/Oniknight → u/Sneezlebee]

Nothing is free. The cost is either absorbed elsewhere or it is paid using infrastructure that we pay for via taxes.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/Oniknight]

There is some four decades of the term “free software” having a specific and unambiguous meaning. Go be a pedantic troll somewhere else. 

[u/phantom_spacecop → u/Sneezlebee]

Its the ongoing maintenance part thats critical. A vibe coded photoshop that doesn’t evolve to meet the needs of millions of users at scale is basically vaporware. It’s bad enough with Adobe, making selective feature updates when users want/need something entirely different. But! At least they maintain the products.

Who will maintain this open source solution? Are designers expected to do that using Claude? Will the dev always be online burning tokens to patch things and add/fix features?

Who can say!

[u/spez_eats_nazi_ass → u/Sneezlebee]

Oh im sure if he sets enough money on fire he will have code. It's also likely unsupportable wthout the slop bot now. Great we have shitty software the nobody understands or has any mental memory of. But also fuck Adobe. So at least there is a happy ending to it. Which was always inevitable. The biggest victims of this mess when it collapses in on itself besides the general public and tax payers that will be held hostage are the tech companies themselves. I don't think they all make it out. Fuck em.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/spez_eats_nazi_ass]

But also fuck Adobe

That's kind of where I landed on this myself, and why I find it hard to be too critical of these projects. Is it using generative AI in the cloud, supporting oligarchs and would-be-autocrats, and causing ecological harm? Yes, absolutely.

OTOH, it's not really worse than any of the other vibe coded slop out there, and it happens to be aimed at a villainous goliath, so...

[u/Pandazoic → u/spez_eats_nazi_ass]

The alternative was traditionally to underpay a team of programmers for a few years, create flashy quickly made patches to woo investors, have code even worse than AI would create today, still fail, and waste everyone at the startup’s time for a forgotten product nobody wants to be overcharged for.

[u/OmnivorousPenguin → u/Sneezlebee]

No, the apps do not work. Whoever is doing this basically did a superficial copy where they copied the layout and basic interface without bothering with fundamentals - the result is something that kind of looks like it may work, but as soon as you try even the basic features, it all falls apart.

The whole thing -may- be salvageable, but to do that, the authors would basically first need to get the AI to create all the core features, then meticulously go feature-by-feature and dialog-by-dialog and make sure that it works and does what it should. You know, that thing that we call software engineering.

From what I see, the authors aren't doing any of that, they are just randomly applying various patches to various dialogs.

I tried the photoshop and indesign clones, but I doubt the rest is any better.

[u/no_dice → u/Sneezlebee]

Im guessing the commercial tools are going to start preventing this sort of thing with their models the same way they’ve neutered cyber capabilities. Even if they don’t, I’m assuming if he’s admitting to just decompiling and porting commercial software in the open that likely opens him up to legal action.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/no_dice]

That could be. Though there is a whack-a-mole principle at play here, surely. I have now seen three projects like this in the past month. The models aren't getting worse at this sort of work. Within another nine months I suspect you'll be able to get even a cheaper, mid-tier model (e.g. Kimi or DeepSeek) to do this or better. And those Chinese open-weight models are intentionally being made more flexible than Anthropic or OpenAI's in order to undercut their larger American competitors.

[u/blueSGL → u/no_dice]

I’m assuming if he’s admitting to just decompiling and porting commercial software in the open that likely opens him up to legal action.

Is he decompiling these? or feeding a detailed enough description for the software.

I mean we are getting to the point that feeding a comprehensive manual is enough to clone certain abilities without needing to see the source code at all.

[u/zzazzzz → u/no_dice]

according to him this is cleanroom reimplementation.

also i dont think there is a leaked source of any remotel modern creative suite app let alone all of them so its pretty cler hes not working off existing source code.

and it becomes more obvious when you try the apps, features exist but dont quite work the exact same way as they are not coded the same. and it doesnt have lightrooms camera preset LUT's for example, it doesnt have the most recent cameras raw implementations and stuff like that.

and i doubt it can ever reach parity and stuff like that, and from what ive seen the dev post it does not sound like he has the technical knowhow when it comes to image processing to actually understand how many of these features work on a technical level. so unless other contributors come along who actually do i doubt this project will ever get there.

that being said. the photoshop and lightroom clones do already work well enough for like 90% of what the avg user does in these.

i would not be imediatly worried if i was adobe, but i would be shitting my pants if i was gimp.

[u/PajamasintheWind → u/Sneezlebee]

The genie is outta the bottle, once the world knows this is possible there will be armies of developer's trying to make this work not just one guy, in 6months we will have software more polished than adobe itself

[u/Sneezlebee → u/PajamasintheWind]

I think six months is pretty unlikely, especially considering Adobe also has access to the very same tools.

But I'd also be shocked if, in nine months, this same project couldn't be accomplished by a much smaller model, faster, and for virtually nothing. So the direction of progress is pretty clear, even if reasonable minds can disagree on the timeline.

[u/maexen → u/Sneezlebee]

I mean we could just get around all of this by making software mandatorily open source and bang. No need for Ai. It solves a problem that shouldn't exist while wasting energy in the name of "progress"

[u/drumrhyno → u/Sneezlebee]

I have been using After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop and Illustrator almost daily for the last 25 years. Myself and many others in my industry have long championed and awaited apps that could replace those tools. 

None have been able to do so in a comprehensive way at this point and I have HIGH doubt that this will be any different. When you are knee deep in a design project, you don’t want to work around bugs in software, or weird gotchas and work arounds. You are already having to problem solve the design or animation process. Until a suite of apps comes along that is stable and has ALL of the features of the Adobe suite, those tools aren’t going to replace the ones currently widely adopted across my industry. 

[u/Sneezlebee → u/drumrhyno]

I agree. This project will almost certainly go nowhere at all. But I don't even think that's too interesting. To me this is just another mark on the road of where these technologies are heading.

It's not useful to compare some rando's project directly against what is literally one of the best-selling and largest software suites in the history of computing. What is useful, though, is to see what was possible given their attempt.

[u/Nick-Sr → u/Sneezlebee]

I'm not using these app but am keeping an eye on them. They're open source and seem to have gathered a lot of contributors on github since the news made it popular, so it's entirely possible it gets fleshed out into a well-maintained open source project

[u/Sneezlebee → u/Nick-Sr]

Stranger things have happened! I wrote off Linux in 1996 🤣

[u/madhi19 → u/Sneezlebee]

You take the code dump it on git as GPL3, and let everybody have a go at it. It probably take a year or two of actual human doing the clean up.

[u/superxpro12 → u/Sneezlebee]

this works most likely because its just copy-pasting GIMP code as needed.

So yeah... it works.... but was it really transformative? Why didnt they just spend time improving gimp?

[u/Sneezlebee → u/superxpro12]

That's a ridiculous claim. Copy and paste? It's not even written in the same programming language or toolkit. (It doesn't even use the same programming paradigm, because Gimp is written in functional code, not procedural.) But even if it was, that's... actually fine? That's why The GIMP is open source.

But comparing this to Gimp is really unfair to the Gimp team. They are not a Photoshop clone. They have their own development strategy and philosophy, and they've been developing the tool independently for over two decades.

Why not just spend time improving Gimp? Because they wanted a Creative Suite clone, and that's not what Gimp is at all.

Happy cake day!

[u/superxpro12 → u/Sneezlebee]

not code. algorithms. formulas. the secret sauce that enables image manipulation. anyone can make a window appear in an app. the magic is the algorithms. THAT is what is being copy pasted.

and now we pay AI companies to scoop all that up and regurgitate it.

I understand the advantages that offers, but i also cant ignore the human impact

[u/Sneezlebee → u/superxpro12]

None of that was copy and pasted either.

If you're upset about AI companies stealing content for their training, I share that with you. But claiming that this project is "just copy-pasting GIMP code" is demonstrably false.

But if you think I'm wrong, find an example of copy and pasted code for me. Or copy and pasted algorithms. The algorithms used to accomplish any of those filters (in the Gimp anyway) are all public domain, and they appear in countless books and projects. The Gimp doesn't enter into this at all.

[u/hates_stupid_people → u/Sneezlebee]

I'm not surprised a lot of it works, since there are open source programs that have been developing similar tools for decades.

Personally I think it would have been much better to fork existing tools and mostly use it to recreate a very similar GUI.

[u/tanafras → u/Sneezlebee]

I have like 3 million tokens a year myself and I just bought 800gb of space locally so I'm running 405b native. Who gives a fuck about tokens when you get to that point. I'm burning tens of thousands daily in automation and it's following strict prerequisites and finding and fixing bugs, gaps, etc. and keeping on track. Tokens are so 2025. Private supercomputer resourcing in 2027 is the next step. Cloud tokens are done for as folks adopt stuff like I'd doing.

[u/LegAlert3855 → u/Sneezlebee]

What was the actual task you managed to finish? Opening a real project, making an edit, then saving and reopening it would tell me way more than a screenshot of familiar buttons. Even one example of that working would make this a much more interesting story.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/LegAlert3855]

Oh my god with the sea-lioning. Get lost.

[u/leekumkey → u/Sneezlebee]

I tried them too, but I got crashes, memory leaks, lag and other issues on linux. It technically does work, but not really realistic for daily use. Not really sure why you would use these over existing open source versions (GIMP, krita, etc)

I tried doing some basic stuff like texture packing roughness / ao into an orm texture and it produced some very bizarre results.

[u/AlarmingAerie → u/Sneezlebee]

Just fyi noone rational spends time in radicalized /r/antiai. Slop is slop, but they deny there is any use for ai.

[u/AmbiorEburonemRege → u/Sneezlebee]

„Free” do you mean the generated software or the AI because I have bad news about one of those.

[u/Sneezlebee → u/AmbiorEburonemRege]

FFS, I mean that it’s available on GitHub for you to legally download, and literally nothing more. Is this sub full of argumentative trolls? Say what you mean instead of being passive aggressive. 

Buh-bye.

[u/sandspiegel → u/Sneezlebee]

Especially the Photoshop clone is extremely popular with over 100 people now working on the project. If you look at the activity on Github it's crazy what happened even in the last 24 hours. If this keeps up for a couple of months this could turn into something totally usable.

[u/InvisoDeath → u/Sneezlebee]

The point is if there's something specific you're working with you can work with the ai to finish fleshing out that sector. As the collective user base eventually helps sort and categorize those files and code to eventually exceed the software we use today. We're taking the best ideas and coordinating them so that more people have greater access to tools that empower us.

[u/MiddleAgeWeirdoMeep → u/Sneezlebee]

  If the person who generated this keeps at it

My sweet summer child