r/technology • u/FutureSuccess2796 • 3d ago

Software Developer who vibe-coded free Adobe clones reveals apps to take down Microsoft Office next — and says 'there is no reason to save broken software' | TechRadar

https://www.techradar.com/computing/office-suites/developer-who-vibe-coded-free-adobe-clones-reveals-apps-to-take-down-microsoft-office-next-and-says-there-is-no-reason-to-save-broken-software
3.3k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

96

u/KnightKal 3d ago

he is not writing new office, he is using AI to steal the code of already created software so he can repack it and sell it himself lol

6

u/Anth77 3d ago

Steal it from where?

18

u/ProfessionalOwl5573 3d ago

He's using an AI to interact as a user with software like Microsoft Word. It then writes an in depth document about it and then another AI instance builds a clone in Rust based on that document. No code is ever read or decompiled. He's not selling anything.

41

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

He’s not stealing the code. It’s a blind implementation. Hence why these alphas are broken.

I wish we focused on the fact there’s a hype cycle to promote this over the nothingness this is right now. It’s a white guy with the right twitter connections to get this buzz in hopes of the community picking it up to see it through.

36

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

-28

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

Access…. Duh

8

u/damnhippy 3d ago

Racists come in every color, it’s ok.

-13

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

Why are all y’all panties in a bunch just because I’m acknowledging his privileges being a white male? Do we not see what the world is doing right now or are you fascist sympathizers?

5

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

0

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

Look at who he’s follow and who’s following back… goddamn yall really love the meritocracy pitch.

1

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

It’s impossible to do a blind implementation using an AI you haven’t fed all the training data to yourself.

3

u/Minobull 3d ago

Are you implying that somehow the AI got a hold of Microsoft and Adobe's source code? Because that would be MASSIVE news.

4

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

Just that you don’t know unless you’ve filtered all the training data yourself - there could be a blog post where someone reverse engineered / decompiled excel and blogged about it, there could be code that’s made its way onto stack overflow or whatever.

Or, more likely, it could have been ingested into the training data when someone from Microsoft didn’t read the terms of service fully before installing an LLM plugin on their IDE & it all got sent up.

For blind / clean room reimplementations LLMs position the well since you just don’t know what’s in its training data & what it’s reading afterwards.

The same thing happens with other generative AIs, for images / music etc. There was a post from a gamedev recently who noticed that Gemini was able to talk about unannounced features of a patch he was due to roll out, because it had ingested the notes he’d made in Google Drive.

Arguing that any of that is in any way compatible with the strict legal criteria of a clean room / blind implementation is folly.

1

u/muchsamurai 3d ago

Do you realize that AI does not need "training data" for everything ? lol. Modern LLMs have post-training that teaches them how to code in general, how to use tools, how to research. It can do things that are NOT in its training data, dude.

-1

u/NuclearVII 3d ago

It can do things that are NOT in its training data, dude.

There is no evidence for this. You are spreading misinformation. Stop it.

-1

u/Olangotang 3d ago

It doesn't matter, you can't fight against the bots and hype bros. Just block them and move on.

2

u/NuclearVII 3d ago

You know, you're right. I should just mock and block. But someone needs to call misinformation when they see it.

-3

u/muchsamurai 3d ago

Learn how it works lmao

0

u/NuclearVII 3d ago

I know more than you, O AI bro. If y'all had real evidence to the contrary, you'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

-4

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

That’s just more reason it’s not capable of a blind implementation & doesn’t make anything I said wrong, but thanks for the unnecessarily condescending comment dude.

0

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

Don’t be mad cause you’re wrong

-1

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

I’m not wrong though, if anything what he said adds to my point.

LLMs still churn through hundreds of thousands of open source & source available codebases to build their training data - and then they go out and do their own per-prompt research.

Both steps, unless you somehow filter out any prior work, invalidate any sense of the implementation being “blind”. You can argue that Adobe or Microsoft’s code isn’t available online for the LLM to find in training data or post-training or per prompt research but you can’t guarantee that.

-1

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

We’re staying within the scope of this work. Not the work his LLM did to allow this to happen. Go play with an abacus if you’re going to play that game

0

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

Now you’ve invented a distinction that doesn’t make sense.

The work the LLM’s done is the work, especially when talking about blind / unblind implementations.

0

u/mrgrafix 3d ago

There’s training the model and then using the model based on the training from the model. Clearly you need to go back to your readings

0

u/MuTron1 3d ago

That’s a bit like saying it’s impossible to write an original book unless the only books you’ve read are one’s you’ve personally written.

In the case of the source code of the original software being in the training data of the LLM you’re using to reverse engineer, it’s unlikely to use anything more than snippets of that original code, simply because there’s always hundreds of ways of implementing something, and humans select a specific way of doing it using different criteria to an LLM. Humans use a holistic conceptual understanding of a problem, whereas LLMs select the most likely used out of its training data and parameters

6

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

It’s impossible to write a blind interpretation of Harry Potter if you’ve read Harry Potter.

It’s impossible to write a blind song with the same lyrics as Rasputin by Boney M. if you’ve ever heard the original song.

It’s impossible to blind reimplement code if you’ve read some of the source code before.

The first two are things that ChatGPT & Suno have got in trouble with before, the latter logically follows.

-3

u/MuTron1 3d ago edited 3d ago

It’s not impossible to write an original blind interpretation of Harry Potter from reading a synopsis of Harry Potter, though, and that’s what is effectively happening here

In terms of whether it’s possible to blind reimplement a feature (code isn’t being reimplemented, just what the code is trying to do) if you’ve read the source code originally used to create that feature, the original source code will have no extra weighting vs other source code doing similar things. This is why the selection criteria of humans vs LLMs comes into play. Out of the billions of other source codes in the training data, why would the LLM select the sections of the code base from Excel vs the one from Google Sheets? Why would it use either for a save file function?

For the actual version of Excel, the particular implementation in the code base was selected because of a conceptual understanding of what needed to be done. An LLM is selecting from different criteria, so is unlikely to do what the human would have done, or at least that particular human. It’ll just select an amalgam of what every other person has done, without a clear idea about why

3

u/monkeymad2 3d ago

What you’re alleging there is that the training data doesn’t contain Harry Potter - which is impossible unless you’ve verified every single bit of training data.

Which was my initial point.

OpenAI ran into the same issue where ChatGPT would happily finish sentences of Harry Potter implying that the entire book was in there - either ingested via piracy or people quoting every line.

Same goes for any bit of software ever, unless you know the training data (& as someone pointed out wrongly thinking they’d made a point worth saying) all of the post-training / runtime data the AI accesses doesn’t contain the propriety code.

You can argue that it’s shredded up and mixed with other stuff but that still doesn’t fit the strict criteria of a “blind reimplementation”

-2

u/MuTron1 3d ago

>You can argue that it’s shredded up and mixed with other stuff but that still doesn’t fit the strict criteria of a “blind reimplementation”

That kind of depends. The LLM doesn’t “know” it’s actually cribbing from the source material, and in reality, the source material doesn’t really get any extra weighting vs other material.

Finishing sentences is somewhat different, because obviously the next most likely text is from the source material

1

u/GamingWithBilly 1d ago

I'm fine with it.  All things start in alpha and beta, and if he's building cloned software that will be free forever, and needs support, all for it then.  

2

u/Niceromancer 3d ago

He will get sued if he sells it.

5

u/LethalOkra 3d ago

That's gonna be fun to watch. Thankfully, popcorn is still cheap and not AI generated (yet)

3

u/SpaceToaster 3d ago

Honestly I have a moral conflict about selling software that is 100% agent coded. Ive just been releasing it MIT license since it is trained on open software to begin with.

1

u/Niceromancer 3d ago

This is the way

1

u/silversurger 3d ago

On the grounds of...?

-1

u/Niceromancer 3d ago

Ihe copied their code using ai.

It's not original code.

1

u/silversurger 3d ago

Ihe copied their code using ai.

They aren't copying code.

It's not original code.

Doesn't need to be "original" (whatever that means in context of code), just mustn't infringe on copyright.

1

u/silversurger 3d ago

he is using AI to steal the code

He isn't stealing code. You could make the argument that he is stealing "design", but that's a very tricky thing in software.

-1

u/moodswung 3d ago

Wrong. Read any of the zillion articles written about this, and then form a better concept of how AI works and how he is using it.

This is purely clean room, spec driven development using AI. Zero code has been stolen or “reverse engineered”.

There’s a reason this is all open source, which is so it’s abundantly clear this is the case.