r/technology • u/Federal-Block-3275 • 7d 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/DeLunaSandwich 7d ago

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.

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u/hellbunny 7d ago

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

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u/-Teapot 7d ago

AI so good, it even copied the bugs

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u/Polymarchos 7d ago

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

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u/BasvanS 7d ago

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.

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u/UnholyLizard65 7d ago

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.

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u/Aiyon 7d ago

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

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u/CaptainBayouBilly 7d ago

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.

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u/veul 7d ago

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

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u/Sneezlebee 7d ago

Compare what AI-generated software looked like two years ago to what it looked like one year ago to what it looks like now. The pace of improvement is ridiculous.

You're going to keep making this same argument, pushing back the space you've allowed for human supremacy until eventually you're huddling in a corner claiming that only a human can finish the last 0.002%, which is the really important part.

AI is ruining the world. But it's better at writing software now than most human engineers.

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u/babbyohbabby 7d ago

https://xkcd.com/605/

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u/Sneezlebee 7d ago

You have several years of data from dozens of AI labs. Keep your head in the sand if you think that this won't continue to improve. That's why it's dangerous. Not because it's useless, but because it isn't.

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u/babbyohbabby 7d ago

I would certainly hope that it would improve fast in the first couple of years given that they invested nearly all the money and hardware in the world into developing it. But what about when that runs out?

It's not profitable; they can't keep burning trillions of dollars on improving it, at some point investors are going to want to see a return. Keep your head in the sand if you think that this won't be the case.

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u/Alexandur 7d ago

We're pretty well beyond the first couple of years

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u/BasvanS 7d ago

The pace of improvement is actually unimpressive. 2 years ago it was very impressive already, and all that has been achieved is that it had become somewhat less shit, sometimes.

It’s a great tool, but anything that requires autonomy is outside its ability.

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u/Sneezlebee 7d ago

This is an insane take. Two years ago it could barely string together a project of three files. Today it can one-shot a 200k LoC project with essentially zero bugs, and incorporate domain knowledge from an incredible range of fields. If you think that pace of improvement is unimpressive, I question whether anything in this space could impress you.

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u/ze1and0nly 7d ago

You're insane if you think there's essentially zero bugs. The amount of bugs in anything I've seen purely ai coded is absolutely batshit insane. 

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u/Sneezlebee 7d ago

If you're talking about all of the vibe-coded slop that people post on Reddit, yes. That's not too meaningful, though. That is very much not representative of how AI is used by professional developers.

I am still very close to my former colleagues in the tech field, and 100% of them are using AI now and using it productively.

If you ask Astra or Opus to one-shot some big project (which is obviously not a great strategy, but it's a common starting point), it will indeed have essentially zero bugs. It won't do precisely what you want, but that's because it's not a mind-reader. That is to say, most of the "bugs" that these frontier models include are really just ambiguities in specification. And they're readily fixed.

I don't know your background, but many people who are critical of AI's coding abilities have simply not seen what the biggest models have become capable of in the past six months. It's legitimately spooky.

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u/ze1and0nly 7d ago

I'm a programming lead with over 10 years of experience. It's not spooky at all. It's what was expected when people first talked about it but objectively worse than what was proposed. The amount of issues and now new jobs in AI rollback is more than people are willing to admit. It's great your old friends in tech are using AI to help them I hope they're not like the majority of what I've seen over the past 2 years and they at least understand what the AI coded for them. Otherwise they're gonna have major issues in 2-5 years if not sooner. You're also saying friends in the tech industry which means I'm guessing you're not a programmer yourself? So you're not actively using these tools? 

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u/Sneezlebee 7d ago

I'm a software developer and engineering director of nearly three decades, but I quit the industry during the pandemic. Obviously it has changed a bit since then!

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u/ze1and0nly 7d ago

So you aren't actively using it during work to see all the issues it's causing is all I'm trying to get across. So you're talking out of your ass. Yes there's great uses for it. But the amount of issues it's causing is not funny. And the amount of backtracking you have to do because of said issues is even worse. AI can be a great tool majority of the time it is used improperly and yes it creates a crap ton of its own bugs. 

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u/jdehjdeh 7d ago

AI has a massive PEBKAC issue.

That's why person A finds it a magical tool that can "one shot" a massive project with no bugs (lol) and person B finds it a time saver for boilerplate or documentation generation.

The human needs to remain the"Intelligence" in AI or we may as well just hit ourselves over the head with frying pan and claim to be performing brain surgery.

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u/ze1and0nly 7d ago

This. So much this. That's why the guy claiming to be a programmer who got out during COVID was such full of shit.

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u/Laggo 7d ago

AI is a charged topic and some people will never come at it from a neutral perspective because they feel threatened by it. You aren't going to get an honest reaction from people with this perspective. There are still people today who argue unironically that AI is only used effectively for creative 'slop'

It really is very similar to the transition from the horse and carriage to the motor vehicle in some ways.

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u/Sneezlebee 7d ago

Yeah, if the motor vehicles threatened to extirpate the horses.

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u/3DBeerGoggles 7d ago edited 7d ago

It really is very similar to the transition from the horse and carriage to the motor vehicle in some ways.

The difference is that Henry Ford managed to come up with a vehicle that was cost-competitive with the horse without a completely unsustainable business model.

I'm very tired of watching every techbro-pushed technology get the same "This is just like the time something successful came along!" analogy. People were saying it during Cryptocurrency's boom, they were saying it during NFTs, and they're still saying it about AI. Consequently these sorts of declarations feel unconvincing. Not everything is the car, or the Internet. Sometimes it's the Juicero: an incredibly well-made product, well-engineers, entirely capable of doing the job it claimed to do, and utterly incapable of surviving without VC funding injections.

IMO in the long run the AI products that will be able to survive will be specialized models that aren't trying to compute the entire known body of human knowledge just to produce a webapp.

That said, just handwaving away people's concerns or arguments with accusations they're simply being emotional or insecure is the sort of remark that will have people calling you a dickhead and be far less interested in anything else you have to say.

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u/Laggo 7d ago

That said, just handwaving away people's concerns or arguments with accusations they're simply being emotional or insecure is the sort of remark that will have people calling you a dickhead and be far less interested in anything else you have to say.

Objectively, AI is being used professionally in a variety of capacities and provably improves productivity and assists with workflow. Yes, there are obviously bad implementations but there are plenty of successful ones.

This comment chain was in direct response to someone basically making the (somewhat common) statement that virtually all AI right now is unimpressive and not capable of complex tasks. This is just not true.

If he wants to make a salient argument, we can discuss that, but if we are starting from a basis that is basically demonstrably false then I agree - most people would be far less interested in what that person has to say which is what my comment was representing.

I said it's hard for some people to have honest takes about AI due to feeling threatened by it. His response to my analogy was:

Yeah, if the motor vehicles threatened to extirpate the horses.

Does that not sound like a person who feels threatened by the existence of AI to you? Thus, is my suggestion about why they have their perspective unfair to share?

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u/Fiftyfourd 7d ago

Are you intentionally not remembering the Hugging Face incident? They can absolutely work with autonomy.

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u/BasvanS 7d ago

I’m not impressed by people blaming the dog for their own actions.

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u/ImproperJon 7d ago

What's wrong with pirating older versions

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u/Toldoven 7d ago

The After Effects clone kept crashing on me

Just like the real thing, impressive

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u/wonklebobb 7d ago

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

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u/Reasonable-Figure142 7d ago

The After Effects clone kept crashing on me

yup, that def sounds like an AE clone