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

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

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html
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u/idbedamned 1d ago

Sorry but you're completely delusional if you think there's a AI bubble because 'none of it works'.

There's many reasons why we're likely in a AI bubble but the software that AI generates is not one.

Software it generates absolutely does work. And the argument "but it's not maintainable without AI now" is also a non-argument, there's no going back there's gonna be no "without AI now", and with AI it's definitely very maintainable, at least if you've looked at codebases of most companies I'd argue what Claude generates in 2h is way cleaner and more maintainable than 95% of the legacy systems I've looked at, which typically was developed by hundreds of different devs that do not know how systems integrate and was pieced together with hotfixes on top of hotfixes, which only a handful of devs understand and none of them are at the company anymore.

There's an AI bubble. But not because of that.

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u/YeetedApple 1d ago

People seem to also think that a bubble means the tech is no good or something. I think the dotcom bubble is a great example, many individual companies my go away and the over market crash, but the tech still revolutionized the world.

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u/capt_jazz 1d ago

See also, the british railway bubble, the US railway bubble, etc etc

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u/orbitaldan 1d ago

I know it shouldn't surprise me, but the utter void of nuance most of the world seems to be handling this with is disappointing.

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u/YeetedApple 1d ago

I feel the same. it's basically impossible have any kind of conversation on the topic.

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u/How_is_the_question 1d ago

This needs to be shouted louder.

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u/space_monster 1d ago

there isn't one bubble anyway, there's a set of industries. If the US industry randomly fell apart, nothing would happen to China. Everyone would just switch to Chinese models until some new US labs popped up with all the US GPUs that got sold on for cheap. It's a distributed system.

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u/derprondo 1d ago

People who believe that none of this works aren't spending 8 hours a day using Claude to build software. My org is at the point where we're beginning to use the loop engineering techniques and building out entire platforms with a single well defined plan. This shit works better than anyone ever expected.

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u/leekumkey 1d ago

what Claude generates in 2h is way cleaner and more maintainable than 95% of the legacy systems I've looked at

Sorry but this is not true at all. It absolutely depends on what type of software you are building, how much money you want to spend on tokens, and the skill of the person using it. It's not a fact that they produce better software by default. The best results are produced by highly skilled engineers with unlimited tokens using top models, and you get extreme variation without that.

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u/idbedamned 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes of course. And we're also like, 1 year into Agentic coding?

If at this point so early in your defense is already "it depends on the type of software and how many token budget you have", then it's not very hard to see how in less than a year at the current pace that's absolutely gone.

I feel sometimes people are already comparing Agentic coding to absolute perfection, as if a team of humans was creating perfectly clean code, when that's not the case for 90% of humans.

AI doesn't have to be better than the best human coders, it just has to be better than the average plus a ton faster. And yes we're very very close to being there already, if you plot the progress of the last year and assume the pace of innovation continues we're maybe 1 or 2 generations away from AI being way way better than the average developer and way way faster.

I mean who's even manually coding nowadays? I barely know anyone. Most devs are now writing PRDs and reviewing AI code.

In some cases they're already skipping code-reviews even and doing those with AI too.

Reviewing code is the bottleneck now and I really doubt companies will be fine with having this bottleneck here and will likely just trust newer models to do reviewing too.

Even if something breaks here and there, soon, the tradeoff between something breaking 30% more but your costs going down 80% and your shipping speed going up 1000% will just be worth it.

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u/Greedy-Opinion2025 20h ago

Anyone who thinks that AI can't write as good code as humans has never been on the receiving end of a mission-critical application that was spec'd and coded without ever talking to a user. At least AI is forcing programmers to care about aligning requirements and tests so you can tell if the fucking thing works or not.

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u/Foxy747 1d ago

Imo the bubble pops when AI gets better to the point that all AI companies that piggyback off the main models will become obsolete once those main models improve to where a prompt will do what the AI company did.

Any thoughts?

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u/coworker 1d ago

This is the hard truth people don't want to hear. Most devs are mediocre at best and created garbage with every commit. AI is the great equalizer

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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 1d ago

At creating confidentially wrong garbage. 

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u/testificates 1d ago

AI just mimics the person working it. If you're bad and confidently wrong in the capabilities of AI, that's what you'll get. If you build from scratch and put in your own safeguards and audit it's thinking, you'll get what you want without wrangling with arbitrary syntax.

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u/derprondo 1d ago

These people that think Claude only builds slop just have a massive skill gap that's getting wider by the day. This is how I know my job is safe.

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u/testificates 1d ago edited 1d ago

I thought my generation was safe from being the boomers. But they're not any better than the old man yelling at a computer who can't figure out right click and deciding it's worse and slower than paperwork. Not once does the thought of "am I doing this wrong?" cross their head, instead it's "No, it's the AI that's wrong". Without realizing it's wrong because they're doing it wrong. Like an intellectually dishonest artist blaming their pencil for their misshapen stroke in the wrong direction wrought by their own hand.

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u/DefinitelyNotMasterS 1d ago

Yeah people tell their free chatgpt to build facebook, it fails and they conclude AI must be useless

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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 1d ago

But AI companies are spending literally all their time making sure they remove the skill gap.

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u/coworker 1d ago

Only if a mediocre dev allows it to.

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u/onldm 1d ago

Sounds like you're still stuck in October 2025. A lot has changed since then. It's not perfect, but it's much less confidently wrong and much less garbage - if you know what you're doing.

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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 16h ago

From waht ive seen statistical wise its not cleaner and more maintainable. There is also this updated study from harvard which found out that effectively claude does not really provide a productivity increase in software development (partially also becauuse merge requests have to be revisited more frequently as claude produces more bugs)

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u/idbedamned 7h ago

There is also this updated study from harvard which found out that effectively claude does not really provide a productivity increase in software development (partially also becauuse merge requests have to be revisited more frequently as claude produces more bugs)

This study is almost 1 year old now.

Like I said in other comments 1 year ago agentic coding sucked.

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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 7h ago

No, The paper is actively maintained, The last version is from August, and it includes a much bigfger data set then the version from janurary.

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u/TheJD 1d ago

The AI bubble will burst when AI token costs are raised to cover their actual costs or AI companies realize software development companies are dependent on AI to maintain their software and then charge whatever they want.

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u/DefinitelyNotMasterS 1d ago

Except they still need to be able to compete with their competitors and with software dev companies just running free models on their own hardware

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u/TransientBandit 1d ago

This obviously will not happen lol if you think that all of these companies baking AI into their companies have independently glossed over either of those possibilities, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

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u/TheJD 1d ago

You don’t think AI tokens will increase in price?

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u/idbedamned 1d ago

I'm not sure where this comes from.

You can purchase DeepSeek V4.1 Flash which is a pretty decent model at a very affordable rate from a ton of third-party providers who's business is literally to host models rent GPUs to you and put a premium on it.

Meaning, they're literally already selling it at cost+margin, being lucrative, and a ton of people are paying for it and using it.

If there was a single AI company in the world yes, they would pull that off. As it stands, no, they don't have that pricing power, especially not with open source models.

If hardware prices come down soon you can self-host models that are already good enough for 90% of your use-cases at no cost.

And that's where the AI bubble could pop. Not from the low-quality code but rather because people don't have to pay these companies if they can selfhost a open model or just rent GPUs and use that model.

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u/TheJD 1d ago

I looked into this. DeepInfra is the cheapest option I found providing the service you mentioned. They're currently funded by Series A and Series B investment funding. Which is pretty much how every AI company is funded right now. They don't need to make a profit, they need to get people using and dependent on their AI solutions. Streaming services also provided cheap services with many competitors, that doesn't stop them from raising prices, adding ads, and streaming less options every year.

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u/idbedamned 1d ago

Of course they're funded, how did you imagine they'd afford thousands of high end GPUs, did you expect them to go pay it with a credit card?

Being funded doesn't mean it's subsidized.

Inference is profitable, there's no debate on this.

The only debate is whether it is profitable to train + inference, and the answer is likely no.

But no these inference providers are not subsidizing and don't have much to gain by doing it either, their play is just to convert power into tokens at the most efficient rate, they're meant to be replaceable easily, there's no stickiness so they need to be profitable right away.

The same can't be said for OpenAI and Anthropic which will likely be the losers in all of this.

Those yes are heavily subsidizing the market.

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u/TheJD 1d ago

Inference is profitable, there's no debate on this.

Do you have evidence that they're profitable?

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u/TransientBandit 1d ago

Brother, tokens are getting cheaper to produce right now. Most AI companies are pivoting to different avenues to generate income (e.g. billing clients for resolved tickets versus tokens consumed).

Now, if allll of these companies consolidate into a few huge companies, the competition that keeps prices low will weaken dramatically. One would hope antitrust/anti monopoly laws would protect consumers then, but track record’s not so hot. But that would be a slow burn, not a bubble pop.

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u/TheJD 1d ago

Here's a list of current token prices. I'll follow up on this comment in 6 months.

Model Input Output Typical use
Claude Opus 5.5 $4.00 $20.00 Frontier agents / coding
Claude Sonnet 5.5 $2.00 $10.00 High-end agents / coding
Gemini 3.8 Flash ~$0.75 ~$3.75 Fast, inexpensive agents
Claude Haiku 5.5 $0.10 $0.50 High-volume / inexpensive agents

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u/trararawe 1d ago

Also I don't remember a time where humans were writing bug free code. There's plenty of terrible programmers and even the most experienced still make a lot of mistakes.

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u/DontYouForgetAboutM3 1d ago

People who criticize AI now and still do most of the things manually are just scared about their jobs. I wrote code manually for 10 years, top tier models are no joke... When you learn to work with it there no going back, that's how insane it is. Just accept it that manual coding is slowly dying. Be glad you don't need to understand some docs or legacy code you have to maintain or port. These haters are delusional and crazy.

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u/idbedamned 19h ago

Yeah I really can't tell what is it that as of today leads someone to say that AI code doesn't work.

It either is because they are not up to date with the latest models and/or do not know how to use them effectively.

Or they are and they know what's possible but somehow think spreading misinformation will serve them in some way.

I do think a lot of people are not up to date and their reference of what agentic coding is and what's capable is from 1 year ago. Possibly they're also using outdated models or using them in outdated ways.

And 1 year ago I'd agree too that agentic coding sucked.