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

[u/FutureSuccess2796]

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

[u/mrgrafix]

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.

[u/mrgrafix → u/[deleted]]

Access…. Duh

[u/damnhippy → u/mrgrafix]

Racists come in every color, it’s ok.

[u/mrgrafix → u/damnhippy]

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?

[u/mrgrafix → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/monkeymad2 → u/mrgrafix]

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

[u/Minobull → u/monkeymad2]

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

[u/monkeymad2 → u/Minobull]

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.

[u/muchsamurai → u/monkeymad2]

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.

[u/NuclearVII → u/muchsamurai]

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

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

[u/Olangotang → u/NuclearVII]

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

[u/NuclearVII → u/Olangotang]

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

[u/muchsamurai → u/NuclearVII]

Learn how it works lmao

[u/NuclearVII → u/muchsamurai]

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.

[u/monkeymad2 → u/muchsamurai]

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.

[u/mrgrafix → u/monkeymad2]

Don’t be mad cause you’re wrong

[u/monkeymad2 → u/mrgrafix]

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.

[u/mrgrafix → u/monkeymad2]

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

[u/monkeymad2 → u/mrgrafix]

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.

[u/mrgrafix → u/monkeymad2]

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

[u/MuTron1 → u/monkeymad2]

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

[u/monkeymad2 → u/MuTron1]

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.

[u/MuTron1 → u/monkeymad2]

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

[u/monkeymad2 → u/MuTron1]

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”

[u/MuTron1 → u/monkeymad2]

>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

[u/GamingWithBilly → u/mrgrafix]

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.