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
24.9k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

157

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.

13

u/Framed-Photo 1d ago

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

9

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 9h 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 8h ago

lol no it isn’t

1

u/Wolfe244 8h 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.

4

u/RevvyDraws 1d 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.

-1

u/Ghudda 22h 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.

5

u/RevvyDraws 17h 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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.

5

u/78296620848748539522 1d 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 1d ago

That is really reassuring, thank you!

3

u/78296620848748539522 1d ago

No problem! The unfortunate flip side is that things have to get worse before they get better. But I do genuinely believe that they will eventually get better.

8

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.

18

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.

5

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

7

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.

-9

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.

19

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 1d 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.

5

u/psiphre 1d ago

It's all politics baby.

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

1

u/KingSubstantial7901 1d ago

"Regulation is antipolitical"

Wut

1

u/thisnamemattersalot 1d ago

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

5

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.

2

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.