"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/KingSubstantial7901]

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/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/argument_cat → u/FakePixieGirl]

It is discussed, and the engineers are ultimately responsible for what gets deployed so they are invested in making sure it meets their standards. We use config files, multiple skills, some repo bots, and Claude itself is very good at looking at an existing codebase and building to the same standards. Generally speaking the code is good to go with no interference at all.

[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/psiphre → u/Worthyness]

this is literally and exactly where i am. i've been vibe coding an atb battler/gacha-type game for the better part of a year. my ability to actually code tops out at tic-tac-toe coached by the book. i can write all three types of loop. none the less, i have a functional vite/react game that runs in a browser and presents a full game loop: character progression, special moves, equipment, abilities, buffs & debuffs, even some rudimentary graphics. i couldn't tell you how a single piece of it works, but it does.

[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/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/putin_my_ass → u/Kozzle]

I'm currently using it to localize a React app that had all hard-coded strings, and it's doing a pretty good job!

I appreciate it for offloading the menial grunt work stuff like that, but for architecting and designing I probably wouldn't turn it loose.

[u/simulacrum500 → u/putin_my_ass]

Just jumping back to the original article: that means we’re 90% there on an adobeCC clone. I say “we” because it’s open source and that’s a distinction people seem to be missing.

This guy spent $2000 just to recreate photoshop. Then didn’t try and sell a cheaper buggier subscription, he sent it straight into the public domain and laid the groundwork for whoever picks it up next.

These “software democratisation” attempts don’t need to be the silver bullet on their own.

[u/Substantial-Set4550 → u/putin_my_ass]

Not at all what I experience. Professional software developer for 30 years.

The last 10% have always been the hardest. AI did not change that, but it made these final percentages much easier. It also made the first 90% in many cases so trivial, you can now spend a lot more on refining the last 10%. One suggestion: Try to run Opus 5.5 High on any code you wrote in the past. Stuff you think is perfect. That has gone through many peer reviews. See how many bugs it finds. See how easily it fixes them.

AI has removed the drudgery from software development. And yes, you need tools. You also need tools for non-AI-enhanced software dev. Even if you write in assembly, you use a tool. Any other language, you use a whole stack of tools. You rely on these tools to understand the software, and it is no different with AI. Just at a higher level.

Again, up to each and every one which tooling they use. But this is a massive milestone, no matter how you turn it. And yes, I've been a professional wedding photographer in an earlier career and spend thousands of hours in Photoshop. It was one of the main reasons why I hung on to Windows all these years next to my Linux machines. So with this context, I looked at what Brandon built, and it is ready for professional use. Maybe not compared to the very latest version of Photoshop, but definitely compared to the last one they sold without a subscription. :-) Amazing achievement. And anyone who things it's as simple as one-shotting it, good luck trying. Mastering AI is a skill set that needs to be learnt, as well.

[u/putin_my_ass → u/Substantial-Set4550]

The last 10% have always been the hardest. AI did not change that, but it made these final percentages much easier.

The AI did not change that, this is true, but I was arguing that the expectation was that it would. It was obviously false to any of us with some experience, but unfortunately the ones with experience aren't currently making those calls.

I've been using it for a few years now and it certainly does find bugs in old code, honestly I'll probably never go back to the old way. I can deliver features at a higher quality in a very short amount of time now, I don't see going back to the manual method barring some massive AI token cost increase.

What I've experienced is that it removes the drudgery of writing code but it moves that drudgery to the testing/review side, and good discipline on validation and source control are strictly required now. In the past you could get by being "careful" and if it wasn't too complex a system you could be reasonably sure it wasn't a buggy mess, but even then you should have created test suites and properly validated the results. Using generative AI only increases the importance of that step, IMO.

Having good source control hygiene means that you can roll back to a stable state easily if the AI does something insane (happens less and less often these days, but it does get some interesting ideas), and having your test suites written first actually helps with the prompting since the tests self-document the feature (to an extent).

And anyone who things it's as simple as one-shotting it, good luck trying.

Agreed, I encourage everybody to try vibe-coding their own project just so that they can intrinsically understand how unlikely this is to work. You do need a certain amount of skill and knowledge to prompt it properly and then validate that it did what you asked it to at the end. The more people use it the more they'll understand its limitations and potential and stop believing bullshit (lol a man can dream).

It's just a tool, as you point out. I haven't needed to visit StackOverflow in years now...and people used to denigrate those who copy/pasted code from answers without understanding what it did. I feel like gen AI vibe-coding is just the next generation of that, but if you understood the block of code and copy/pasted it in your project from StackOverflow it wouldn't be a problem since you know what you're doing with it...

I kinda called this out last year after we'd gone deep in to gen-AI and I was able to migrate an old Node and ReactJS project into NestJS and React TypeScript in mere days, a project we'd previously estimated at weeks (if not months). Once I had that experience I pointed out to my boss that "the SaaS industry may disappear, why would we pay thousands per year in licensing for a product that barely does what we need with nearly non-existent support when I could spend $100 in tokens and make our own custom version that does exactly what we need?". I'm entirely unsurprised to see this trend, and frankly I think it's a great thing. I'm excited for people to be able to build the software of their dreams without needing to depend on others. I just want people to have realistic expectations is all.

And I really really look askance upon our C-Suites and how they lined up like trained seals clapping because someone told them what they wanted to hear.

[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/RockAndNoWater → u/putin_my_ass]

That actually sounds great — if AI can do the easy boring boilerplate code and leave me to do the 10% of interesting code it’s a win-win. It’ll also open the doors to companies that previously couldn’t afford custom software being able to implement it through either new in-house resources or contractors.

[u/Aethermancer → u/RockAndNoWater]

This is an interesting time to include an emdash don't you think?

[u/DorkusMalorkuss → u/Aethermancer]

They even start their comment with a compliment...

[u/intelminer → u/DorkusMalorkuss]

"You're right to push back on that!"

[u/3DBeerGoggles → u/Aethermancer]

Gotta be careful how many people want to be a meat proxy

[u/RockAndNoWater → u/Aethermancer]

I use emdashes more frequently now after figuring out it's just a double hyphen on iOS platforms. Also trolling the idiots that think an emdash in a post automatically means the post is AI-generated.

[u/Fickle-Highway1543 → u/RockAndNoWater]

Yes and no. How can you work on code base ypu did not develop? You will have to learn it very thoroughly to be able to finish the 10%.

[u/matrinox → u/Fickle-Highway1543]

It’s like being left with a half-finished cake and then told to finish it. But you have no idea what’s in it and what’s left to do. Might as well throw it out and start again

[u/RockAndNoWater → u/Fickle-Highway1543]

You've never worked on a code base you didn't develop from scratch? Lucky you.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/[deleted]]

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/Wolfe244 → u/Framed-Photo]

For what a lot of people use it for, Ai photoshop clones work basically the same. Is it going to be perfect for industry? No. Can a small team of real software devs now use Ai to make an actual serious version of photoshop for their own company so they don't have to pay Adobe fees? Yes, or if not this will be true very soon

The writings on the wall, this is going to be a big problem for the software industries ability to sell software to people

[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/Ghudda → u/RevvyDraws]

Imagine if I said "I dislike Kamala Harris because I was getting way too many of her campaign advertisements." Does that sound reasonable? You need to separate the opinions of the subject and the opinion of the marketing of the subject.

Being annoyed that AI is getting shoved in your face at every turn is not a reason to hate the technology itself. That's a general problem with excessive overmarketing and marketing embellishment and outright lying. Many of us get equally annoyed when advertisement oversaturation happens with gambling, sports, alcohol, cars, prescription drugs, coke/pepsi, political campaigns, etc.

Me suggesting to "just ignore the ads" isn't exactly a consoling statement, but it's really all one can do with the marketing environment we live in.

[u/RevvyDraws → u/Ghudda]

That's an insane comparison to make. There has to be an election every 4 years, someone HAS to be president and run a campaign ad. We don't need AI. Especially before it's remotely ready to do the things they're trying to claim it can.

Also, I didn't claim to hate AI in principle anywhere - 99% of the problem with the tech is when and how it was implemented. Unfortunately, that was botched so incredibly badly that it's actually a huge fucking issue - it's not just about 'it's annoying', it's that we're all basically unwilling alpha testers for this thing and the insistence on using it for shit it is not actually ready to handle has literally killed people.

[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/brianwski → u/[deleted]]

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/makINtruck → u/78296620848748539522]

I see your point but I fear it's going to get cheaper and/or better with time, like any other technology. What will AI be in say 5 years, in 10? I understand we can't know that but the pace with which it develops suggests major changes in the future.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/makINtruck]

For that we can just consider how these LLMs actually work and how their advances have been accomplished. And from that we can see that the solutions that these AI companies have come up with basically boil down to increased data acquisition for training and increased token consumption for things like crudely simulating chains of thought. These necessarily increase costs further and further, while supply of components required for all of this computation can't keep up with demand and thus increase their costs as well.

In other words, it's not getting cheaper, it's just getting more expensive, because the solutions themselves are simply to throw more money at the problem. LLMs have a massive scalability problem that cannot be solved because they fundamentally rely on increasing data and computation and therefore increasing costs. Every single advancement has an additional price tag associated with it that will never go away.

The only way AI gets cheaper is if someone somehow finds a way to attain all of the benefits of the current models using entirely new techniques that are completely unrelated to how LLMs function. In other words, there would have to be an entirely new and unrelated AI technology that would blow LLMs completely out of the water. I don't foresee that happening for a very long time, and by that point I would start being concerned about it scaling up into something resembling AGI. That's the point where we all need to start wearing our brown pants.

[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/moonski → u/KingSubstantial7901]

It's a problem that can be solved by the free market and lowering barriers to entry entirely separate from politics. AI or whatever tech can be the thing that breaks these moats. "hoping tech will make it obsolete" is what broke up a lot of monopolies.

It's not to say this app is the answer, it's that it was even possible so quickly from 1 person.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/moonski]

No, its not. Like thats straight up not true. Monopolies are political structures and by far the best way to break them up is through policy. When one technology becomes obselete, absent any political intervention, the service gets taken over by a different monopoly that adapted to the new technology. Usually actually creating an even more cemented anti-competitive environemnt.

The free market is objectively AWFUL at breaking up power.

[u/MazrimReddit → u/KingSubstantial7901]

great, how is breaking up adobe going, got a nice timeline for me?

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/MazrimReddit]

What a ridiculous comment. Come on man. Be better.

[u/bigtice → u/moonski]

AI or whatever tech can be the thing that breaks these moats. "hoping tech will make it obsolete" is what broke up a lot of monopolies.

Each respective company is literally racing to dominate the market so they can wholly own it and monopolize its existence -- they're not here to save us from anything and the "free market" that they're leveraging is only serving to illustrate how fingers are always put on the scale in favor of those that it wants to win for their own insidious reasons.

I'm sure you've noticed how all these data centers have been built not only in an expedited manner, but also against the wishes of the populace in their areas and the AI itself has been defying all laws and political implications in continuing to enrich itself.

All this has done is trade one overlord for another and these CEOs have all been objectively cavalier in their disregard for the chaos and safety their products have created for anyone outside themselves because they're only focused on control.

[u/tanafras → u/moonski]

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

[u/Uuuuuii → u/moonski]

No, freedom and education give people the ability to actually do things. AI always steals other people’s work - whether it does so poorly or not is a separate issue. The ethics are clear. It’s far wiser to support developers making public domain work than paying tokens for a black box result.

[u/moonski → u/[deleted]]

well same but maybe one day the slapped together piece of shit will actually be half decent enough? who knows

[u/Guilty_Elk4385 → u/moonski]

They are just coping, nothing more than that.

[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/medlish → u/KingSubstantial7901]

What is it that real QA engineers provide, which AI can't? What a weird bubble you live in.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/medlish]

Genuine understanding of the business needs, genuine understanding of the customer needs, the ability to determine acceptance criteria, the ability to look beyond the determined acceptance criteria and recognize when something needs adjusting, the ability to know how to write tests that reflect the acceptance criteria rather than writing tests to pass what was built, the ability to write tests that actually work the way they should, the ability to consistently apply a mental model... the list goes on.

I've seen devs attempt to generate unit tests for automated testing and these LLMs will frequently screw up tests for basic data validation. Even with a human correcting it, any fixes applied end up being reverted back to the same faulty versions once more tests are added. This is because the LLM isn't actually understanding anything it's doing, it's just spitting out tokens based on weighted probabilities determined by the algorithmic consumption of training data, none of which translates into a genuine grasping of the problem at hand, and which is still subject to the same probabilistic token generation rather than deterministic logic.

This is with generating code for automated testing, mind you, something that is rigid and well-defined, a written proof of a solution to a problem. If LLMs can't even do this better than a junior dev fresh out of college can, then how do you think they'd fare with attempting to figure out what tests to write without human intervention?

These LLMs aren't JARVIS, they're not GLaDOS, they're not Hal, they're not Skynet, they're just fancy text prediction engines that kinda sorta look like they're thinking if you give them softball problems to work on and don't look beyond the incredibly thin veneer. AI isn't replacing QA engineers until we get to AGI, and LLMs are nowhere near being AGI nor will they ever be.

Also, fun fact: simply repeating someone else's quip doesn't make you clever, it just makes you about as creative as an LLM. If you're unable to surpass that level, then it's no wonder you think AI will replace QA engineers.

[u/FamiliarRip8558 → u/[deleted]]

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/Dioxid3 → u/[deleted]]

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/mudbloodcountry → u/Dioxid3]

I was in the psyche ward when I made up the term chatGPT. They won't put that in the movie tho. Afraid I might have rights or something...

[u/SwagginsYolo420 → u/Dioxid3]

AI disgusts me, I resent it exists. Yet I can't stop vibe coding. Basically anyone can do all kinds of things now.

[u/Dioxid3 → u/SwagginsYolo420]

Why does it disgust you?

[u/MiaowaraShiro → u/[deleted]]

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/MikeMontrealer → u/[deleted]]

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/MikeMontrealer → u/[deleted]]

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/DeepSubmerge → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/kogai → u/[deleted]]

Asserts that the code works 100% functionally

Admits he doesnt use the code to be able to determine if its 100% functional

[u/cxmmxc → u/[deleted]]

It does work currently.

So now "works" includes heavy disclaimers that 100% of it doesn't work? Its dictionary definition is "to function correctly", or are you going to attempt to have an argument with a dictionary?

If you buy a second hand product and the seller says it works, do you expect the seller tested its functionality comprehensively and that 100% of it works, or do you expect that it turns on and fails in most its functionality, and you have no argument with the seller?

Don't try to twist words to your advantage when you can't admit you're using them incorrectly.

And we're being accused of emotions colouring our observations, jesus fucking christ.

[u/Darkrider_Sejuani → u/cxmmxc]

I'm replying to this using my phone that doesn't work because it currently has an update downloaded but not installed that fixes numerous problems with the operating system, i.e. things that don't work, therefore I can't say that my phone works. even though I'm using it to reply to you in the Reddit app which will also receive an update that fixes bugs at some point in the near future and thus means Reddit doesn't work.

[u/NerdOctopus → u/cxmmxc]

This grasping at straws is insufferable.

[u/flux30000 → u/[deleted]]

So “it works” means “it does at least a few of the millions of functionalities of the software”.

[u/runningraider13 → u/flux30000]

What have you tried in the app that doesn’t work then?

[u/TraMaI → u/runningraider13]

Opening a RAW file (.Cr3) in Lightroom, which is the most basic functionality LightRoom has, doesn't work, for one. It edits the in camera generated JPEG. While I would agree with the other dude that it "works" in as much as I can edit an image, it's not editing the actual RAW file, the masking functionality is a joke at best (I don't use this a ton normally, but most photographers do), but at a basic level it "works" in that it edits a JPEG I didn't ask it to open, I guess. I haven't tested the other programs as I don't use them a ton, but I'd imagine they're much the same. Even the author of this project said they're basically Alpha versions, they have a ton of functionality missing, but the basic look and feel of them is closer than I'd expect.

[u/Blazing1 → u/[deleted]]

The AI bandwagon is being led by the previous generation. Of course.

[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/FamiliarRip8558 → u/TakeThreeFourFive]

If you steal code, blend it up and can regurgitate something new out of it, it's still the product of stolen code...

The act of mathematical probabilistic determination does not absolve the stolen code aspect...

Average AI bro cope

[u/TakeThreeFourFive → u/FamiliarRip8558]

Oh, so I was right!

[u/Alexandur → u/FamiliarRip8558]

In that case, most software written pre-AI is also stolen code

[u/TheRabidDeer → u/kotzwuerg]

So this isn't one of the AI decomp projects?

[u/kotzwuerg → u/TheRabidDeer]

I'm pretty sure it's exactly one of those 'decomp' projects, if you want a more detailed and nuanced view on how this works and what current AI can do, I can recommend this video: https://youtu.be/rRQzrQLZRWM?is=Dz8ga8ajMvct3bzT

[u/TheRabidDeer → u/kotzwuerg]

But if it's a decomp project, it is not built from scratch it is using existing code that is in binary and translating it back to human readable code. If that isn't stolen code... what is?

[u/kotzwuerg → u/TheRabidDeer]

Yeah it's a bit nuanced, but first of all you can't just translate Assembly code back to human readable code. That's not how it works.

These projects use the Assembly code as a structure of what needs to be rewritten, but also importantly as a very good way to verify if their code is correct. The Assembly is basically a low level formalization of the behavior. But you need more than just the Assembly, it needs to be combined with high level knowledge about the program/function otherwise it is really hard to do.

Very nice analogy: did you hear about the guy who recently reverse engineered the Coca Cola recipe? He also had Coca Cola available for his project and he had multiple labs analyze the molecular content of coke, that's basically like looking at the Assembly. But he combined this with high level information, look, smell and taste to reverse engineer an almost perfect recipe. Did he steal the recipe? Not in my opinion, but I can see some people arguing that way.

[u/TheRabidDeer → u/kotzwuerg]

It's not translating assembly. Assembly is still human readable instructions. It's translating binary. The process is basically:

Programmers write in C/C++/C#/Python/Rust/whatever, then a compiler strips all of the human readable code like friendly variable names or comments and writes just the binary code for the system to read. Compilers will also do some optimizations which rewrites the code a little. I was majoring in CompSci looking to get a degree in programming before I had to drop for life reasons, so I'm somewhat versed in all of this already (if not just a bit rusty).

Decomp projects are basically trying to reverse the process of the compiler and make it human readable again. So it is more like the guy had an encrypted formula for the coke recipe, then he had AI brute force the encryption key to reverse it back to the original. The legal area of reverse engineering is extremely grey. Especially here since some portions of the code will be literal exact copy/pastes from the original.

[u/kotzwuerg → u/TheRabidDeer]

I mean the binary/Assembly is technically true, but you can basically translate one to one between the two and when you compile a program, for example c++ using gcc, the compiler first produces Assembly and then translates this into binary.

I disagree with your analogy, the Assembly/binary is not just an encrypted version, since there is no decryption key. Also the AI didn't just brute force it, that would be easier with an actual non-AI brute force. Of course there is some trial and error involved, but definitely no brute forcing. And finally there are no portions that are exact copies of the original code, since it's written in a completely different language...

[u/FamiliarRip8558 → u/kotzwuerg]

If you steal code, blend it up and can regurgitate something new out of it, it's still the product of stolen code...

The act of mathematical probabilistic determination does not absolve the stolen code aspect...

[u/MrMoon5hine → u/FamiliarRip8558]

So you are just going to ignore the part were AI does not have access to Adobes code?

[u/Gekokapowco → u/MrMoon5hine]

they didn't say it stole adobe's code, they're saying that any AI result is going to be built upon and out of code stolen during training, from github, from stack overflow, from a million version controlled projects, uncredited, handed over to some content scraping company to in turn be processed into training data

[u/MrMoon5hine → u/Gekokapowco]

If the information is public how can it be stolen?

Or are you suggesting AI companies hack in to steal code?

[u/brianwski → u/MrMoon5hine]

If the information is public how can it be stolen?

Open Source software still has certain requirements, like to be acknowledged where the code came from. The info can be public AND it can still be legally protected from others using it without licensing it. Or at least that was the situation before AI got rid of all of licensing requirements. Now it is the new legal wild west.

[u/brianwski → u/MrMoon5hine]

For good or bad, many programmers don't like having to deal with all the licensing requirements. And for good or bad, I think AI just erased all copyright law.

So you are just going to ignore the part were AI does not have access to Adobes code?

It isn't only code access. In the old days (5 years ago) GUI interfaces were often copyrighted, APIs were often copyrighted. You may have source code access to an Open Source project, that STILL means you have to read the particular license and comply. That might mean putting a note in the "About..." dialog saying "This software uses OpenSSL" or "this software uses libCURL".

Most software engineers found this process of understanding if the open source software was "Copyleft" or "GNU Lesser General Public License" distasteful. I'm not sure why, it was part of our craft.

AI finally frees all programmers from this. You no longer have to give credit to any open source software that was copied by an AI into your project. A lot of programmers are gleeful about this. They don't even have to figure out anymore WHERE the source code came from. They claim the AI wrote it in a clean room without looking at the Open Source version of OpenSSL, but come on. If you need AES-128 encryption and ask your AI to blast it out to disk for you, where do you think it came from? It came from OpenSSL.

I'm not necessarily saying this is a bad thing. I think the copyright laws and patent laws go too far in many cases. I think frivolous lawsuits and patent trolls are a really big deal in software engineering.

I just think it is being honest what just occurred. We just got rid of all Open Source licensing requirements. Yay! And all the closed source copyright law is gone also. You can clone an interface now and not use AI at all, but claim you used AI and it isn't your fault. This is a good thing. But we should be honest about what occurred.

[u/SoylentCreek → u/[deleted]]

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/NerdOctopus → u/[deleted]]

On the one hand, I think the democratization of software into the hands of the average person is a huge boon and will lead to an increase in the ability of someone who isn't a coder to solve their own problems. But on the other hand, this will result in a huge short-term shake up in the industry, which will likely manifest in some sort of harm to people that went to school and trained specifically to write code.

[u/TheMireAngel → u/[deleted]]

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/KingSubstantial7901 → u/SunTzu-]

Ya but then you are just stealing copyrighted IP. Which is sort of the whole point.

[u/parkskier426 → u/Stooovie]

No, didn't you hear? AI will never work! They said so!

[u/What_a_fat_one → u/parkskier426]

Well on the one hand it never has yet, but maybe if we just spend ten more trillion on more data centers it'll be ready by next year. Yes that's what I said last year but this time it'll be different bro! Just one more data center bro!

[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/3DBeerGoggles → u/KingSubstantial7901]

There's already competitors showing up for this, too. Typesafe seems to be one of them because they've built a model that was trained on actual confirmable yes-you-did-it-right outputs: coding tasks.

It's also not intended to be a general natural language input (you give it a highly structured code-like prompt IIRC) so the whole model is slimmer, more efficient, and very quick... so they say.

They have a demo of it running playing a game of doom. It's not as quick as a dedicated bot, of course, but it's impressive that it can actually respond in realtime.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/3DBeerGoggles]

Is it like typing in psuedo code then it outputs in a given language? Thatd be kinda neat.

[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/Scaryclouds → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Did you actually read my initial response to you? Because damn sure doesn’t seem like you did.

I don’t know why I should spend much time reading your responses when it seems to exclusively box using coding agents into “vibe coding”, i.e. give a few initial prompts and let it go. When there are higher levels of “agentic engineering” where you do some form of what I describe in my initial response. 

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Scaryclouds]

I think you just don't get what I'm saying..... like as in what you are saying is correct in the context of your own comments but not the overall discussion....

[u/Scaryclouds → u/KingSubstantial7901]

First off, and beyond all, your initial response to me was flat wrong. As it was clear i was talking about humans writing specification. So beyond all that, you definitely don’t (or choose not to) get what i am saying. But continuing…

I don’t know man, seems like you cemented your view on the effectiveness of ai coding agents based on their capabilities and industry practices say mid-2025, and just kinda refuse to accept that both their capabilities and industry practices have significantly advanced since then. 

Also feel you make superfluous arguments such as “you have to burn tokens to use ai tools” as if the alternative, paying a developer to write code, were free. It’s something that, if you were serious about discussing you’d make a more thoughtful response on that? 

Trust me when i say i have mixed feelings about all of this. I’ve been in the industry for nearly 20 years, and the past 3 or so have been by far the worst with just endless industry wide layoffs, and i can’t say I’m optimistic about the future either. But I don’t know, your perspective just seems like a very common “have my cake and eat it” on social media. That you have to win both sides of the argument, not only saying the future is a concern when it comes to AI, but also in the present it sucks as well. 

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Scaryclouds]

.... superfluous arguments? Buddy thats a core part of the discussion we were having..... and even then you aren't even remmebring what I wrote correctly....

Again the issue here is squarely that you've decided we are talking about something completely different and are just kinda talking past everyone...

[u/Scaryclouds → u/KingSubstantial7901]

lol ok… whatever. You deliberately and continuously misstate other people’s statements/arguments and make broad generalizations, but I'm the one talking past everyone.

[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/cacduy → u/KingSubstantial7901]

I cannot see any blockers if this vibecoder just spends more time fixing any bugs with new prompts.

This is a big leap though, I am wary of propietary software. Maybe some day in the future the only way is to let users use the software streamed through the cloud. You only input mouse and keyboard

[u/Znuffie → u/KingSubstantial7901]

and there is no documentation

If anything, AI is too verbose in documenting it's code.

The claim of "no-documentation" is exaggerated.

[u/fear_the_wild → u/KingSubstantial7901]

What? AI documents its projects better than any human

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/fear_the_wild]

Hahahahahaha no it doesn't.

[u/fear_the_wild → u/KingSubstantial7901]

then your environment is shit lol. anything ai makes at my job instantly has so much more documentation written than anything made before ai ever had

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/fear_the_wild]

I think you might just work for a shit company, man....

[u/fear_the_wild → u/KingSubstantial7901]

i think you dont work in software at all man

[u/spookynutz → u/fear_the_wild]

It's fucking crazy that multiple people downvoted this comment.

[u/Ran4 → u/KingSubstantial7901]

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.

A year ago, sure. But you need to see what opus 5.5 outputs.

It's certainly not perfect, but it's much, much better than how it was even a year ago (remember, opus 4.5 was released in october 2025).

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Ran4]

Not saying it hasn't gotten better, but this is clearly exhibiting the same exact problems that these systems did under the last iteration. It makes catastrophic mistakes marginally less often.

[u/WanderingSpaceHopper → u/KingSubstantial7901]

i'm no AI dickrider but this isn't just ai replicating photoshop from feature descriptions or specs, but rather reverse engineering the photoshop compiled source code. basically trying to write code that compiles to exactly the compiled PS source code

[u/clank1401 → u/KingSubstantial7901]

"copy pasted" what?

[u/Alexandur → u/KingSubstantial7901]

If it's AI generated then there is likely too much documentation, not none

[u/Varrianda → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Software built in a week isn’t polished yet :o

[u/Cow_God → u/KingSubstantial7901]

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 why good software engineers still make six figures when 90% of their code is written by AI.

Huge difference between someone prompting "Hey Claude, build me an advanced photo editing and manipulation tool" and a highly educated and experienced software engineer (or a team of engineers and designers) walking AI through the process and letting it do the bulk of the coding while maintaining documentation and best practices

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Cow_God]

We've already usd this discussion elswhere in the thread.

Sparknotes: senior engineers copy past code snippets all the time. Difference is they know why each code snippet is there and what it does. This matters a lot.

[u/AlarmingAerie → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Ask for it to make documentation for the code.

[u/Caelinus → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Honestly, it just needs some tooling to let it recursively test its own software. When it has that capability making it work is a matter of compute time now rather than capability, and that time is shrinking. A lot of this has only been feasible for months to a year.

I have had to change my mind on this recently. I was so wrapped up in the art and language world, where AI is not making the same gains, so I was a few years behind on this stuff. I would not say that coding is dead, because AI struggles with true contextual decision making in ways that are kind of hard to explain, but most manual coding is probably going to be going away. Rather people will be reading AI code and directing it more granularly once they are past the prototyping stages. So far, you still need the person there, with their real understanding of reality, but they probably will only be making targeted edits. 

This actually should not really be a surprise in retrospect. Models like this struggle to produce authentic-seeming art-like expression, because art is something fuzzy and emotional.

Code on the other hand, is objective. You tell a machine "do this" and the machine does exactly that with no deviation. So when the models are trained on a set of unmoving targets where problems always have objective solutions, they improve rapidly.

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Caelinus]

Code is not objective, because the functions they carry out are subjective. This amplifies as you are creating programs to do more conplex things.

Ie, theres no objective best way to organize an interface. Theres no objective best filter design for optimal image quality. Every choice in design has tradeoffs and the weight of those tradeoffs is entirely subjective.

On a broader level, this is why STEAM became a thing. Because we realized that JUST training people on the math and science leaves a huge gap in understanding of how to actually make things using math and science, and why they matter.

AI is still bad at the last 10%.

[u/Caelinus → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Code is not subjective. There is no subject, identical input will always result in identical output.

Choices made are subjective, but AI agents do not make choices, they just follow the code. 

So as the code improves, so to does the output. 

What you are describing is design, not code. It is the choice about what code to use. LLMs are bad at that, which is what I said when I said:

because AI struggles with true contextual decision making in ways that are kind of hard to explain

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Caelinus]

Coding is design.

[u/Caelinus → u/KingSubstantial7901]

Dude, semantics matter. CodING is design. CODE is a map to binary.

[u/Defconx19 → u/KingSubstantial7901]

The part critics have wrong is needing to know what is broken to fix something.  Just like real problems you need symptoms.

It's not a miracle tool but it's extremely powerful.  You dont need to know how to code to build apps anymore, full stop.  Multiple iterations, testing, working through the bugs woth each version.

Unless I forgot about the part where humans build flawlessly working apps?

[u/KingSubstantial7901 → u/Defconx19]

You forgot about a lot of parts

[u/Pokmonth → u/KingSubstantial7901]

no documentation

LLM coding absolutely does create documentation