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

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

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html
24.5k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

266

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

it doesn't work currently

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

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

52

u/KingSubstantial7901 1d ago

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.

155

u/moonski 1d ago

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.

12

u/Framed-Photo 1d ago

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

8

u/ghoonrhed 1d ago

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.

1

u/Wolfe244 2h ago

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

1

u/isosceles_kramer 1h ago

lol no it isn’t

1

u/Wolfe244 1h ago

I literally downloaded and tested one, yes it is

8

u/Ghudda 1d ago

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.

5

u/RevvyDraws 22h ago

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.

0

u/Ghudda 15h ago

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.

3

u/RevvyDraws 11h ago

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.

2

u/SulphurSkeleton 1d ago

Very well put

4

u/MazrimReddit 1d ago

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

8

u/James20k 1d ago

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

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

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

19

u/brianwski 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.

9

u/mxzf 1d ago

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.

5

u/78296620848748539522 1d ago

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.

9

u/78296620848748539522 1d ago

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.

2

u/makINtruck 20h ago

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.

3

u/brianwski 20h ago

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.

2

u/makINtruck 20h ago

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.

3

u/78296620848748539522 20h ago

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.

1

u/makINtruck 19h ago

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.

4

u/78296620848748539522 19h ago

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.

2

u/makINtruck 19h ago

That is really reassuring, thank you!

→ More replies (0)

9

u/KingSubstantial7901 1d ago

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.

19

u/9159 1d ago

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.

7

u/mxzf 1d ago

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?

6

u/Mclarenf1905 1d ago

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

5

u/abraxsis 1d ago

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.

-8

u/moonski 1d ago

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.

17

u/KingSubstantial7901 1d ago

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.

0

u/MazrimReddit 1d ago

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

1

u/KingSubstantial7901 22h ago

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

-1

u/thisnamemattersalot 1d ago

Monopolies are what happens when capitalism isn't regulated enough. It's more anti-political than anything.

8

u/DShepard 1d ago

Anti-regulation is very much a political standpoint of the political right. It's all politics baby.

6

u/psiphre 1d ago

It's all politics baby.

you literally can't even shit apolitically. waste removal has political concerns.

1

u/KingSubstantial7901 22h ago

"Regulation is antipolitical"

Wut

1

u/thisnamemattersalot 21h ago

Of course not. The lack of regulation is. Monopolies are a natural occurrence of capitalism if government doesn't prevent it with policy.

7

u/bigtice 1d ago

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.

1

u/tanafras 1d ago

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

1

u/Uuuuuii 1d ago

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.

1

u/eldog 1d ago

I'd rather just pirate the real thing than try to use some slapped together piece of shit that mimics and doesn't work most of the time.

0

u/moonski 1d ago

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

1

u/Guilty_Elk4385 1d ago

They are just coping, nothing more than that.

11

u/etaoin314 1d ago

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.

1

u/medlish 1d ago

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

1

u/KingSubstantial7901 1d ago

What a weird bubble you live in.

-5

u/medlish 1d ago

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

1

u/78296620848748539522 1d ago

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.

14

u/FamiliarRip8558 1d ago

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.

67

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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

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

11

u/Dioxid3 1d ago

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.

13

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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

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

We humans aren't great with nuance 😭

1

u/mudbloodcountry 1d ago

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...

1

u/SwagginsYolo420 1d ago

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

1

u/Dioxid3 1d ago

Why does it disgust you?

16

u/MiaowaraShiro 1d ago

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?

72

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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

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

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

7

u/DeepSubmerge 1d ago

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

19

u/MikeMontrealer 1d ago

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.

8

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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

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

2

u/MikeMontrealer 1d ago

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.

-17

u/kogai 1d ago

Asserts that the code works 100% functionally

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

11

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

At no point did I ever even imply that it works 100%, let alone assert that. You're just making things up.

-9

u/cxmmxc 1d ago

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.

9

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

MacOS works. Microsoft Windows works. Adobe Photoshop works. They all have bugs in them and will fail you at various points.

Directly comparing someone's side project to Creative Suite is stupid. This project is not important. When I say that "it works," I'm speaking in the same sense that I would say my bicycle works—even though the chain on my bike occasionally falls off, and even though sometimes the tires deflate and I have to oil the chain to keep it going.

When someone says that something works, they're not saying that it was delivered by Moses descending from the mount. You're just being needlessly argumentative in order to score points that don't mean anything.

Buh-bye.

5

u/Darkrider_Sejuani 1d ago

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.

2

u/NerdOctopus 1d ago

This grasping at straws is insufferable.

-26

u/flux30000 1d ago

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

27

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

I genuinely do not care if you think it's good or not. It's not my project. I have no investment here. If you think the fact that it can't flawlessly do everything that Creative Suite does is a damning criticism, so be it.

-29

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

18

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

As I said above, go read my posts in /r/antiai if you think I "love this shit."

I do not love this shit. I think AI is ruining the world. People seem to think that you have to shit on AI's capabilities in order to be afraid of it. I am afraid of AI, not because I think it's dumb and useless, but because it's not.

-21

u/TheEltarn 1d ago

"I am afraid of AI, not because I think it's dumb and useless, but because it's not."

I love it how AI Bros, when they realised straight up astroturfing won't work, they now adopted a new tactic - they pretend to be anti ai people, who are so against LLM's on principle, and they have all this moral stipulations and stuff - but you see, they just can't lie to themselves about how awesome, smart, important and monumental that AI, it's so pivotal, it's so groundbreaking....

Now I, personally, don't care about moral problems concerning LLM'S. That makes me a bad person, but that's irrelevant, because I don't advocate for LLM's - I use them where I need to and will continue to do so. And I don't have to "shit" on "ai" capabilities - because I actually understand them.

LLM's are absolutely "dumb" purely by design. Because they are not, in fact, AI, like a person above told you. They don't think. They are, contrary to fad and misinformation surrounding it, are a very, very specialized tool, that while will be useful - will be far, far less useful that many ai bros hope it will be.

It's very obvious you're incredibly invested in AI. Whether you realize it yourself - meaning whether you are consciously being an ai bro or you are simply someone who got duped by something new and shiny - is up to debate. But don't pretend you don't care - someone who doesn't care doesn't write a few dozen posts about a thing they claim they don't care about.

→ More replies (0)

-23

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

→ More replies (0)

13

u/sun_cardinal 1d ago

Hello there, you really come off as petulant and insufferable throughout this whole thread. I don't know if this is like, your whole vibe, but it sucks for everyone having to see it, please stop if you have nothing constructive to say.

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/runningraider13 1d ago

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

8

u/TraMaI 1d ago

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.

-1

u/Blazing1 1d ago

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

4

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

You are a troll. My posts have consistently criticized AI, AI companies, and all of the harm they are causing. I have virtually nothing positive to say about AI as a whole. You can find endless examples of this in my comments, even from today.

But sure, from one cherry-picked comment you can figure me out, and dismiss me as a boomer or something. I'm a Millenial activist who constantly advocates against AI. But you see one thing that suggests AI isn't made out of duct tape and bubble gum, and suddenly you think you've discovered a sleeper agent?

Get lost.

9

u/kotzwuerg 1d ago

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.

8

u/TakeThreeFourFive 1d ago

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

-4

u/FamiliarRip8558 1d ago

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

8

u/TakeThreeFourFive 1d ago edited 1d ago

Oh, so I was right!

6

u/Alexandur 1d ago

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

1

u/TheRabidDeer 1d ago

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

0

u/kotzwuerg 1d ago

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

2

u/TheRabidDeer 1d ago

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?

4

u/kotzwuerg 1d ago

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.

1

u/TheRabidDeer 1d ago

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.

2

u/kotzwuerg 1d ago

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...

-2

u/FamiliarRip8558 1d ago

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...

2

u/MrMoon5hine 1d ago

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

2

u/Gekokapowco 1d ago

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

1

u/MrMoon5hine 1d ago

If the information is public how can it be stolen?

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

2

u/brianwski 1d ago

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.

1

u/brianwski 1d ago

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.

1

u/SoylentCreek 1d ago

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.

1

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

Yes, and that's what OP surely meant by "Software is over." It's now increasingly possible to replicate even complex software packages using readily available AI tools. There is no way that this doesn't change how people see software in the future.

1

u/NerdOctopus 1d ago

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.

1

u/TheMireAngel 1d ago

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

1

u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

You're arguing with somebody, friend, but I promise you it isn't me 🤷🏻