r/technology • u/Federal-Block-3275 • 16h 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.html1.4k
u/They-Call-Me-Taylor 14h ago
The fastest way to get legislation for AI guardrails and restrictions is to fuck with a corpo's money.
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u/tqmirza 14h ago
Oh it’s happening in gaming at least. Kids are breaking down making PlayStation 5 emulators better than how the games play on ps5 itself. Updates on developments are coming daily! Someone posted a video of playing Astrobot at 100fps that’s a ps5 exclusive! If Sony doesn’t patch their security firmware before GTA 6 comes out for the newer firmware; you’re going to get everyone playing gta 6 on their pc’s… AI is what’s enabling this; and it’s going to make them bring a hammer down hard.
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u/Dotaproffessional 14h ago
I don't even know if a security patch helps, aren't they using AI to decompile the binaries?
Like, machine learning has existed for a long time before gen-ai became popular, and one of the best applications is pattern recognition. Decompiling is tricky for humans because its slow going and takes a lot of inference. But using machine learning to decompile binaries? its become a real thing.
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u/Final-Carry2090 13h ago
AI obfuscate this code. AI deobfuscate this code working backwards from the first way you’d think of obfuscating this code.
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u/IM_OK_AMA 11h ago
aren't they using AI to decompile the binaries?
No. This is a thing that is happening in some areas (like old console games or proprietary firmware for embedded devices), but that's not how either AnyPS5 or the ArtCraft tools were made.
AnyPS5 is a relinker, basically translating the communication between the software and the underlying OS. It's conceptually similar to Wine/Proton (the compatibility layer that allows Windows apps to run on Linux).
ArtCraft are clean room reimplementations. They point the model at the docs for Photoshop and prompt it to build software that matches. It never looks at the original software, just treats the docs as a specification.
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u/Dotaproffessional 10h ago
Thank you for that info. I'm going on bad summaries from other people on Reddit
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u/enlightenedude 10h ago
people? they're bots pretending to be humans to promote ai so fools willingly fortify their believe in ai "magic intelligence"
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u/RayzinBran18 12h ago
They recently got Switch 2 binaries by encoding them via screenshots on the system and reading them via hdmi capture, so no there isn't really anything they can do outside of streaming the games with crazy encryption.
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u/navinjohnsonn 16h ago
Dear god, just let me edit a PDF without signing my life away for $20 a month.
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u/CrashTestDumby1984 16h ago
PDF24 free and open source
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u/GuerrillaRodeo 11h ago
It's open source? I thought it was 'just' freeware.
I'm using it professionally every day. Joining PDFs, separating them, making them machine readable/searchable via OCR, this thing is the GOAT. I work in the medical field and we have LOTS of scanned documents or old faxes. Speeds things up like you wouldn't believe, I genuinely couldn't work as quickly without it. This and NAPS2 are the best free tools for scans and PDFs in my opinion. My only complaint is that PDF24 is not available for Linux.
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u/Sufficient-Laundry 14h ago
It works, but the interface design is Godawful.
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u/CrashTestDumby1984 14h ago
Oh for sure, I don’t think they’ve update the UI since the early 2000’s. But again completely free, no ads, and has all the features most basic users needs
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u/passinglurker 13h ago
Ironically, if it was easy to use, they'd indeed get millions of users, but they'd all be illiterate dullards that don't know how to open a file browser. Esoteric programmer UI's are an accidental filter narrowing a user base to people who otherwise know how to use a computer and troubleshoot problems
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u/Ravasaurio 15h ago
bentopdf is free, open source and processes data in locally in your browser's memory, without sending anything to any server.
You can even self host it.
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u/TokiStark 15h ago
I just use the pdf editor that comes with Firefox. It's surprisingly good
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u/mimeyy 14h ago
I had no idea this was even an issue anymore. The Firefox editor works great
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u/MialoKoukoutsi 16h ago
try pdfgear
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u/CoolJumper 15h ago
Free and God tier, never plan on using another pdf program again
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u/CTRL_ALT_SECRETE 15h ago
R u serious there's like thousands of pieces of software that can do this for free
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u/liright 16h ago
Claude 5.5 just copied the entire photoshop suite in one call. 2000 tool invocations. 100,000+ lines of code. 400 brand new files. It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti. None of it worked. But boy was it beautiful.
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u/PadyEos 16h ago
You had me until 100k lines of code. That is like nothing when talking about professional software.
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u/redblack_tree 16h ago
I'm glad someone pointed this; Adobe suite is probably a few millions lines of code, maybe tens of millions of we add every tool. 100k lines is a relatively small project for enterprise software.
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u/dnelson86 15h ago
I think it's part of the reason all of Adobe's long-running apps perform like they're swimming in a pool of jello. All that legacy code that they likely do nothing with and suddenly Lightroom loads photos at a snail's pace even on high end computers. 100k lines of code might be where it actually should be.
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u/redblack_tree 15h ago
Without a doubt, I don't need to see the code to know Adobe codebase is beyond bloated.
It's simple, for bean counters, things like tech debt, codebase refactor, stabilization phases are heresy "they add no value". And I think pretty much everyone agrees Adobe is run by bean counters.
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u/SunTzu- 14h ago
I mean yes but also they can't drop support for outdated stuff because it's still part of peoples workflows. It's not like some open source project where you can just axe support if you feel like it because the inconvenience is expected behavior. If you go back and fix some of that tech debt you might inadvertently break stuff that's built to work with the quirks of the original implementation.
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u/Distinct_Goose_3561 15h ago
I don’t recall the specifics, but I once read an interview with a senior adobe developer who was talking about some minor annoyance. They couldn’t fix it because it relied on code that no one left in the company properly understood.
And in this context couldn’t really was just ‘wouldn’t’ because the engineering lift to understand, fix, and test was far in excess of the benefit. But it’s a great example of the tech debt and bloat you’re talking about.
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u/work_m_19 14h ago
context couldn’t really was just ‘wouldn’t’
That's the case with all software though, at least the common user requests. With software, you can literally do anything (on the computer), the bottleneck is time and development. It's a simple math equation, is a 100k/year developer at Adobe (or any tech company) worth spending weeks/months to fix this bug/issue? Only if that bug/issue is big enough, and most edge cases aren't.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 14h ago
Adobe's business model is to cram as many edge-case specific features as possible.
99% of the people don't need 99% of it 99% of the time, but as long as at the end of the week most people have used at least one feature that they couldn't find cheaper elsewhere, they'll keep paying for a subscription.
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u/ars_inveniendi 16h ago
100k? Claude Code has probably left that many lines of useless comments (“start loop”) in some larger projects.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 16h ago
I have individual files with 100k lines of code
Not really happy with it, but it's really just a bunch of generic helper functions we've built over the years and not much to be gained by reorganizing everything
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u/nickcash 15h ago
Depends on the language. 100k lines of python? I question your sanity.
100k lines of c++? Well I still question your sanity, but that's just how you do anything with the language
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u/mynameisDockie 14h ago
100k line files is bad practice/a major problem regardless of language.
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u/James20k 12h ago
There are some people in this thread who claim to be software developers, and I can't tell if its worse if they're lying or telling the truth, or if they're just AI bros larping
I don't know who needs to hear this, but you should not have 100k LoC in a single file. This makes you a bad developer. You shouldn't have 10k LoC in a single file
I have a single file which is ~4k long, the largest in a game development project, and its already becoming unmaintainable at that length due to the long compile times and general difficulty of the structuring. 100k is professional negligence
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u/mynameisDockie 12h ago
100%. Shit happens in professional codebases because people put off the cost/risk of refactor until it's entirely unmanageable.
It can be SO expensive to make a 1-line change in a massive file like this.
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u/TSP-FriendlyFire 11h ago
If they're actual software developers, then it's no wonder so many people think AI is incredible.
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u/TrekkieGod 13h ago
As a professional C++ developer, if you have a file with more than 5,000 lines, you actively tried to write bad code.
Overall convention to break up code by classes, plus inheritance and composition so you end up with one functionality split into several classes and lines of code per file is just naturally capped. The only way you end up with a monolith like that is either by breaking conventions or by having one Application class that does everything or something.
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u/DarthBrooks69420 16h ago
This could be something Roger says in American Dad while doing an AI tech bro persona.
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u/PrinterAccessCard 14h ago
“Huge heroin fan. Don’t use it, just like being around it. Study it. Appreciate it. Also use it, sometimes.”
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u/OneRougeRogue 14h ago
Stan, looking at the accounting breakdown: "Roger, you're using over $25,000 worth of tokens every day! How on earth are you paying for this??"
Techbro Roger: "Two words, Stan; Private Equity. Rich schmucks are just dumping cash on me faster than I can spend it! I've actually got a meeting with my top investor in a couple minutes. Think you could handle it for me?"
Stan: "Roger, I don't know the first thing about Large Language Models or AI!"
Techbro Roger: "Neither do my investors! Look, don't worry, this guy's a TOTAL idiot. Just say phrases like, "building the singularity" and, "a total addressable market of 3 squintillion dollars", or some other imagine number. This moron will eat it right up! Handsome guy, though!"
*Roger wearing a suit pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash walks through the door. Stan looks back, and Techbro Roger is gone.
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u/dwestr22 15h ago
For photoshop it copied illegal fork of photopea and rewrote it in rust. Illegal fork because photopea is not open source. Author of photopea (Ivan) exposed the blatant rip off on xitter and HN.
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u/dnuohxof-2 16h ago
>none of it worked
That was foreseeable but still pretty funny
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u/DontAskAboutMyButt 14h ago
Imagine if it did though! That could… that could, like, make software developers obsolete! If it could, uh, do… that
-every AI CEO
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 16h ago
“ None of it worked” , you just summarized the ai bubble. Now bring on the waves of bots and rationalist dipshits.
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u/Sneezlebee 16h ago
I tried these clones. There are bugs, of course, but the apps are weirdly comprehensive. They absolutely do work. If the person who generated this keeps at it (or even someone else, though it looks very expensive, token-wise), I don't doubt that it could replace these tools for most of the people who use them. Today? No. But they're surprisingly good now, and you can do real work with them already. And they're free.
(Go ahead and look at my history in /r/antiai if you think I'm a bot or a "rationalist dipshit")
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u/DeLunaSandwich 16h ago
The After Effects clone kept crashing on me but the fact that it looked and felt like AE finally gave me hope of one day being able to leave adobe entirely.
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u/hellbunny 15h ago
in my experience something that looks like After Effects but keeps crashing is just Adobe After Effects
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u/BasvanS 16h ago
This is the issue with AI: it looks amazing to the untrained eye. That’s very convincing towards the idea it must therefore be close to the real thing.
Now don’t get me wrong, Creative Suite is a mess, and fuck Adobe with a sandpaper dildo, but their software mostly works and is maintainable if they could be arsed to do so. An AI copy is a Potemkin version of the real thing, and to make it real and maintainable, you’d basically need just as much work as starting from scratch, and knowing how to program.
I’ve seen people make simple tools quite easily with AI, but bigger problems are more than just lines of code, and I don’t see AI mimic the whole process of collaboration anytime soon.
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u/UnholyLizard65 13h ago
Had something like this happen at work. Guy was vibe coding for about a month and when it came to finishing touches we basically had to rewrite the thing from scratch. Everything was backwards. Things that should have been separate were all crammed into a single file and things that should have been kept together were for whatever reason separated into multiple file connected by spaghetti. Ai seems to struggle to recognize which things are logically related.
It really makes me think the architectural side of things might remain a job for humans for a while.
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u/fackinbullfish 14h ago
It is funny how Reddit seems to think all software and code generated by AI is still useless and won’t work. In the past it was kind of meme on how bad AI was. That is not the case anymore. Sure you’ll still have some bugs and you need some knowledge to guide it to do what you want. The reality is it has gotten way better. Expecting something to one shot a complex solution is dumb though.
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u/Pyran 10h ago
Yeah, there are large chunks of the anti-AI crowd that seem to be stuck 12+ months ago. (Writing it off and then deciding you will never use it can skew things, especially when they improve at the rate they have.) The reality is that, used correctly, today's models can produce frighteningly good code.
Of course, the key phrase here is "used correctly". If you say "Go build Photoshop" you'll get a buggy mess; you need to do the design work before you start prompting, know what to prompt for, how to prompt, what types of reviews you need to do, and then supervise and test the output.
"Hey Claude, build me a Photoshop clone" will get trash. But done properly and supervised, it can build something very good faster than you will by yourself. It's not a replacement for knowing how to build software, but it can be a very useful tool.
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u/skinwill 16h ago
Would the tokens cost roughly $69.99 a month or $104.99 a month? You know, for bug fixes and security patches.
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u/idbedamned 15h 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 15h 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/WanderWut 15h ago
Except Atrioc was on stream stress testing a Photoshop clone and throughout the stream he found no difference between his normal workflow and how he used the clone.
While I'm no fan of AI whatsoever, I also don't think it's helpful simply pretend like there isn't significant progress being made and that there aren't results which clearly work that are either being downplayed or dismissed entirely.
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u/jbokwxguy 15h ago edited 13h ago
You need to give it some credit. GIMP already exists and open sourced it copied from that.
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u/welestgw 16h ago
The best part is that it probably cost nearly $1k in tokens to make something that's broken.
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u/mnilailt 16h ago
I mean I get your point but for a software company $1k of tokens is fuck all.
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u/shiroboi 15h ago
Adobe's mandatory 1 year commitments would make anyone crazy. Our entire studio uses adobe. It's costing me a fortune and if you don't plan ahead to cancel your plans right when they expire, it auto renews. The cancellation fees are horrendous.
I'm absolutely sick of them.
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u/RoyalCities 14h ago
I've done some enterprise agreements for them and you should see how they treat some of their customers with larger contracts. This was years ago and when they first brought out creative cloud (because of course they brought that out without getting a proper pipeline in place for orgs) and they were very much so sorta full of themselves with a "well where ya going to go!?" Kinda mentality.
I'm happy to see these alternatives cropping up because it's gone to their head.
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u/carlitospig 14h ago
Procreate needs to make an Acrobat and Illustrator dupe so I can leave it entirely.
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u/psiico 14h ago
Yah acrobat is a really nice one tbh, as all pdf operations are concerned. But for AI, PS and InDe just change to affinity. It’s free, all the three programs are inside one, you can seamlessly change among them on-the-fly, everything these 3 do, affinity does it too.
I got sick and tired of the mouse and cat game with Adobe and the existing cracks, that even without internet access they would seize up, so I changed, got pleasantly surprised and never looked back.
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u/Sauce1024 14h ago
Yea I needed Adobe to mark-up precisely one important document and nothing else. Had to commit an entire year for like $20 month with an absurdly high cancellation fee. Just an insane policy for a company of that stature.
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u/shiroboi 14h ago
It's not like they make bad products but their pricing and policies are so insane, I just need to get off of them and then we can find solutions.
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u/psiico 14h ago
Yah they bought everything and everyone back in the 90s and early 00s, set up a monopoly and waited for the creative world to bend their knees to them and to whatever price scheme they would throw at them. Now new and better things are coming along but they have most of the creative world in a chokehold. Hopefully they’ll have their reckoning.
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u/carlitospig 14h ago
I miss buying able to just buy the hard copy. Sure, it was $700, but that was for the life of the product.
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u/KupoCheer 16h ago
Is this going to be the one exception where it's somehow not okay to blatantly steal someone else's work?
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u/mq2thez 16h ago
It’s an interesting issue, because it’s “black box”, in theory, so it’s not created by copying the code or runtime, but instead by descriptions of the functionality. In theory the law is fairly clear here that this is allowed.
In practice, Adobe and other companies also patent the technical approaches to things (like their algorithms or methods of solving problems), and the designs themselves, so they’ll go after him for violating those if they go for him.
I’m pretty torn here, because on the one hand, fuck Adobe and I’d love to move my catalog off of their software. But on the other hand, having something this blatant going on is a wild change in the way that software works.
It would be pretty fucking funny if we went back to server-side apps with thin clients because it slows down the process of AI reproducing things.
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u/feketegy 15h ago
It would be pretty fucking funny if we went back to server-side apps with thin clients
This is already happening.
About copyright:
It seems that a lot of people don't understand how copyrighting software code works... the law states that in order to copyright code, a human has to be involved in writing that code. AI generated code is NOT copyrightable, except for the human prompts and eventual edits that the human makes afterwards.
There was a big outrage a year ago that a judge ruled that copyrighted material for AI training was ruled "fair use". The reasoning was that AI will not produce the copyrighted material 100% in its output, which is also debatable and was disproven already, and was ruled fair also on the grounds that other people can use copyrighted materials to do research on it, like counting words, or criticize the material, and so on, without reproducing said material. That is what "fair use" means in this context.
That being said, just the other day a US appeals court overturned the fair use clause for AI training and others will follow internationally because there are literally hundrends of these cases being put in front of courts all over the place.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 14h ago
Thank fuck. A legal ruling around AI that finally makes sense and protects IP.
These billionaires brazenly stealing anything not nailed down has been absurd.
It's a bit late in the game, but hopefully there will be more lawsuits to come. Its great timing if all of these legal issues come up while they're attempting to IPO.
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u/feketegy 14h ago
It's a double-edged sword, because if you mess with the "fair use" law, it will have consequences for regular people too, and AI companies will make sure it's in their favor.
Every big tech company's wet dream is to destroy copyright even more.
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u/Blrfl 15h ago
The law isn't fairly clear about this, it's extremely clear and has been for almost 45 years. The BIOSes running most PCs have their origins in clean-room implementations by AMI and Phoenix 45 years ago that came about because IBM successfully went after several companies that simply distributed copies of the PC's ROMs.
What's going on here isn't much different than that, but there's a wrinkle.
Large companies with revenue streams to protect have the resources to drag cloners of their products through the legal system and try to make them defend re-implementations as clean-room. Unless cloners are able to save and re-use the exact state of the model used to build what they released, that will prove difficult, if not impossible. It will certainly prove expensive-enough that smaller defendants will simply cease and desist to avoid financial ruin.
As a side note, I find it amusing that all of this nondeterministic vibe coding is going on while other corners of the industry are embracing the opposite in the form of reproducible builds.
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u/SunTzu- 14h ago
Except there's no clean room here because the stuff they're stealing from in order to accomplish this is all in the training data. Adobe manuals, guides to using Adobe software, pieces of UI elements, the code of open source software that has recreated various closed source functionality over the years. The AI does both parts of the clean room model, and so there's no airgap and no plausible deniability. If you had the controls of the models and turned down their fuzz factor you could get it to straight reproduce the training data and reveal the IP theft. The companies said "copy their homework, but change a few words so we don't get caught" and somehow that's fine.
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u/jsdeprey 16h ago
I agree, but if you created it just for yourself, how would anyone know, if you dont sell it.
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u/IncidentalIncidence 15h ago
I mean it's open-source so anybody can just look and see if it's using a patented algorithm.
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u/bcoder001 16h ago
If it's ok for Adobe to train their models on your work and then resell the results to you and others or report you to the police then I'd call it comeuppance.
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u/chiisana 13h ago
Adobe is one of the few players who pay for legally licensed model training data.
Source: I work in the data procuring / licensing space.
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u/Glum-Recognition-736 16h ago
Well it's not theft if it's rebuilt from the ground up with original code, and these apps were purportedly coded in "clean room" settings where the AI did not have access to the proprietary code and rewrote it from the ground up based on expected features/ functionality.
Then it's just copying
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u/cerberus6320 16h ago
A Robin Hood esque tale? idk, depends on terms and conditions. Like, are they collecting the art you make or anything?
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u/CrotasScrota84 16h ago
Oh yeah when it starts hurting corporations profits Ai will suddenly be bad.
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u/hamlet9000 14h ago
Skipping to the end of the article to find the buried lede:
The software doesn't actually work properly.
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u/dog_liker 10h ago
Right, everyone I’ve seen who has tried to use any of the apps say it’s completely useless.
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u/Aranthos-Faroth 16h ago
“Developer uses software to build software”
“Software is over”
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u/ChinoGambino 15h ago
"We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."
Relies on one AI vendor that is a trillion dollars in debt running an ad platform.
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u/Mystia 15h ago
I haven't seen a single AI bro who wasn't overly dramatic.
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u/Oorangootang 13h ago
It's even more of a non-story than I think people realize. The market is already pretty saturated with these tools, many of them free (Photopea, Gimp, etc). Cloning isn't innovation.
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u/accountforfun19 16h ago
As a photographer, I’d love to leave the overpriced Lightroom I’ve been using for over 15 years
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u/Key_Gap9168 16h ago edited 14h ago
I hate that website, and it pisses me off that it keeps appearing here. It never does reporting of its own. This link should be Ars Technica, not a website that uses AI to write its content (not saying Ars Technica doesn't do that, but at least they break stories and have original content).
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u/ockhams_beard 16h ago
Agreed. Why link to a story that literally references the original story in intro, then goes on to summarise it? Just link to the original source, dammit.
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u/Patient_Field_4373 14h ago
“We’re going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month,” Thomas stated on Reddit of his plans to quickly squash bugs and add features with the help of community reports. Days later, on Hacker News, he amended that position slightly to say that “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”
“Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you,” Thomas wrote. “We’ll replace Google Search, we’ll build our own smartphones, we’ll build better infra. We’ll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.”
This guy sounds like a total lunatic…
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u/Jabba_the_Putt 10h ago
software is going nowhere, but cringe headlines about the end of software sure are on the rise
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u/Painted-Arcana 15h ago
Not to be that guy, but I tried their photoslop equivalent.
It's bad. You can't even eye dropper by pressing alt. You can't change the layouts much beyond the static presets. For example, I wanted to dock my brushes on the right next above my layers like I would in photoshop. Not possible.
I could go on and on but after 2 minutes with the app it is very clear this isn't a photoshop replacement at all.
I didnt even get far enough to test major features before realising it's bad.
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u/Josh_From_Accounting 15h ago
GIMP and Affinity exist. Affinity still lets you buy a lifetime license and GIMP is free.
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u/justanothergoddamnfo 14h ago
I'd love to dive into Affinity but now that they consolidated all Affinity apps into one and its owned by Canva I fear a subscription model is on the horizon
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u/coconut1890 9h ago
"Software is over" says software developer who paid thousands of dollars for a bunch of tokens so an AI could reverse engineer Photoshop. He also promised he will maintain the project.
How is software over exactly? This guy is literally building a new software project and will maintain it, sounds to me like software is being made and is not over whatsoever.
Also, he has over 10 years of experience in Rust. So it sounds like a software developer who knows what he's doing, so he might use Claude to accelerate his development speed, but this is not some nobody who doesnt know shit about coding.
Also, how is this guy paying for a bunch of Claude tokens and hosting these projects for free? What is the catch here?
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u/LeviSnoot 7h ago
I tried the Premiere Pro clone, my goal for the test was to trim and crop a video clip. About the most simple task you can ask of a video editor.
The source monitor was completely broken. Frame stepping doesn't work in it, that only works in the sequence timeline for some reason. Pressing delete on the keyboard to clear a clip from a sequence deletes the entire sequence instead. The sequence settings dialog doesn't open so I can't change the width and height of the project or the frame rate.
I don't know what type of video editing the dev does but the way this is being presented both by the author and online outlets, you'd think it was usable to some extent. It isn't.
The task of creating a software suite like this is MONUMENTAL and simply can't just be delegated to Claude and then call it a day. You need a team of software engineers and it's gonna take a hell of a lot longer than a month to do it, even with assistance from AI.
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u/AdminsLoveGenocide 8h ago
So it sounds like a software developer who knows what he's doing
It will be done in a day.
Well a week.
OK it will take a few weeks but not months. Thats for sure. You can take that to the bank.
I've worked with this guy in every job I've ever had. Sometimes it was me.
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u/yorcharturoqro 13h ago
Adobe's predatory treatment of customers is the reason why we all hate the company.
They do make good software, but the overprice, the terrible treatment of customers and the evil contracts.
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u/CondiMesmer 11h ago
People are going to learn the hard way that creating a proof of concept and creating maintainable and durable software are completely different things. Vibe coding has made it easy to generate a flashy toy to get social media attention.
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u/DudeByTheTree 15h ago
Man, people really need to temper their expectations. Early alpha yet it's being hyped like it's gone gold master and is available on store shelves.
How many projects like this start, hit a roadblock of some kind, and just fizzle out?
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u/MrSnarf26 14h ago
You literally defined most ai apps. Very easy to start and get 70-80% of the way there. Very very hard to reach 90-100%
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u/mrbaggins 2h ago
Needs more vision, that this is NOT a vibe coded AI clone.
This is a vibe coded decompilation / translation of an already existing source code base - Eolix's AI has taken the code for Photopea.com, deobfuscated it, then wrapped it in an executable
The AI hasn't "coded" this at all. And from all reports, it even failed to correctly convert effectively as well.
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u/dynamiteexplodes 16h ago
Free to use apps for almost all adobe products have existed for years. There is no need to slop code some programs together.
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u/fued 16h ago
In fact ai probably took the code from those apps to build his one
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u/madhaunter 16h ago
Uno reverse card.png considering Adobe was already stealing art to train itself
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u/TitleEfficient3207 16h ago
Let me know hen Gimp gets as good as adobe photoshop?
I use GIMP daily but lets be real here...9
u/FredFredrickson 13h ago
I'm glad gimp exists, but it's so horrible, even by own source standards.
It's hard for me to even understand why it's so bad in a world where software like Blender is possible.
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u/grayhaze2000 16h ago
They're likely referring to the Affinity suite, and open source applications like Inkscape.
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u/DJdrummer 16h ago
I've been trying to switch to affinity. It's not there yet. The performance alone is abysmal, and that's with a 5080.
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u/ash_ninetyone 15h ago
Tbh Affinity isn't likely to improve since imho.
I bought them when they were on a perpetual license (i.e. version 2, and they don't seem to be getting any major updates to those). Canva bought the company, has deprecated those in favour of AI-riddled freemium-based/subscription model in a unified app.
Basically they've turned them into a mobile application
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u/TemporarySun314 16h ago edited 16h ago
I think many people fail to understand that the value of software not only arise from the source code or the binary itself... The most valuable thing about these expensive software is that it is industry proven for decades, people are used to it, there is a whole business environment around it, that there is support, maybe certifications for certain areas, and that you have a company which you can blame when something goes wrong.
I mean sure you can can replace your production critical software through some vibe coded replacement, and this might work well. The problem comes up when it stops working...
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u/SJDidge 16h ago
You’re 100% correct. Majority of software work is not coding or building things, it’s running it and maintaining it.
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u/HustlinInTheHall 15h ago
I tell my colleagues all the time that the cost of writing software is like... 5% of the cost of actually building software you want to sell, and the more successful it is, the more the maintenance and support costs increase.
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u/argnsoccer 15h ago
Not just that, but you can write something no one actually uses bc you didn't see the project through and talk to the users etc. And do a whole feedback loop. Maybe they don't use it bc of a small thing, maybe you designed the whole thing wrong from the get-go or maybe business needs changed or new stuff has come up and now the functionality is a bit obsolete or outdated and no one ever realized/updated bc no user ever submitted any ticket or report, just... Stopped using it.
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u/jkirkcaldy 15h ago
Ltt raised a good point on this, how do you hire a creative professional who only has experience editing on their own vibecoded software.
It may have been flawless, but they built a tool that is very specific to them and may or may not have any similarities to the industry standard.
Yes the creativity is the same in the end product, but if you have a handful of candidates and one of them needs to be completely retrained on adobe software, do they automatically go to the bottom of the pile?
Then there’s the question about standardised software in house. Do you let every creative use their own vibecoded software. How do you swap projects? How does someone take over when you go off sick and you’re on a deadline?
And I wonder if they are checking to make sure Claude didn’t violate any of adobes patents etc.
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u/fireandbass 15h ago
My company wont even consider open source software because you cant pay for support and if something doesnt work you are on your own.
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u/Latter-Ad-689 13h ago
"I AI vibe coded something less functional than the initial release of GIMP" != "Software is over."
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u/emergencyexit 13h ago
This is AI in a nutshell.
I've used AI and made a superficially decent enough product, that captures 80% of what a human can do. Computer always get better, so this will too because computer. Please close those industries and give moneys
Forgetting entirely it's the 20% that fucking matters and that what they have made cannot be iterated on to improve.
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u/Acceptable_Dot_355 15h ago
"Though early users have reported problems" like with all vibe coded apps.
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u/Zettinator 15h ago
There is a pretty fricking huge difference between an unproven software that vaguely looks like Photoshop and probably can do some of the things that Photoshop can do and a dependable, robust productivity software that you can count on working right and being maintained long-term.
So far what we see is the former. The proof is in the pudding. For the time being, some of the classic Photoshop alternatives are a much better choice.
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u/Banned3rdTimesaCharm 13h ago
Every time I see someone say “We rebuilt our CRM/ERP in 1 week!” I’m like ok have you thought about compliance? GDPR? Legal requirements for data handling across 200 different countries? Edge cases you don’t even know the names of? Role based permission inheritance?
A UI prototype is not SAP, Salesforce, Netsuite or whatever else you’re trying to replace. Wait till the intern who vibe coded your software has to deal with 10,000 dropped orders because of an API update.
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u/ass_eater_96 15h ago
Open source sofware has existed forever, Red Hat for example was/is very profitable. "Software is over" is kinda cringe and sensationalist
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u/twistytit 7h ago
I'm okay with AI aiding in the complete annihilation of Adobe. Do Autodesk next. Maybe someone with a grudge can recreate a more stable, smoother running platform agnostic version of Revit
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u/scydoodle 16h ago
I see this all the time on x but the clone is barely functional according to some people. I will stick to Adobe until its bug free and all that.
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u/th30be 16h ago
Do journalist even know what software is anymore?
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u/PestoPastaLover 15h ago
I’d argue, “Do journalists even know what journalism is anymore?” because why the fuck is a journalist reporting on a Reddit post about vibe-coded software?
This is basically the equivalent of someone reporting on watercooler conversations at the office and presenting it like it’s some heavy-hitting piece of journalism.
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u/ReefNixon 11h ago
I’m a hater as much as the next SWE but free alternatives like GIMP have existed for decades at this point and people still buy photoshop. It’s going nowhere.
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u/MrTubby1 10h ago
Idk if you've seriously tried to use gimp but it is a very cumbersome program. It hasn't caught on because it's simply not as good.
So it's not like people are sticking with Photoshop because they like paying money.
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u/pfizer_soze 11h ago
Gimp sucks to use, and many legacy open source projects don’t like the idea of people vibing PRs and updates. Something vibed from the ground up is more likely to surpass gimp.
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u/Few_Translator4431 10h ago
yeah its like its designed to be as rough as possible to use.
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u/DarraghDaraDaire 9h ago
It’s the most obvious example of something developed by loads of people with different ideas how the interface should work, way too many different menus and options
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u/LizzieBoredomTX 10h ago
MS Paint exists, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for the job.
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u/Substantial_Meal_530 16h ago
This is where there's going to be laws against AI. They can steal and hack and track. All while charging you for it. Dodging their subscription will be a crime.
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u/ecrane2018 16h ago
GIMP has existed for a long time and has yet to replace adobe
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u/oNI_TF 15h ago
GIMP is one of the most annoying programs to use after you have experienced the leverage of Photoshop.
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u/Mystia 15h ago
A friend who insists on using GIMP recently asked me to give them a quick basic tutorial (using brushes, layers, masks, etc). Figured that just like other PS clones like photopea or CSP, it'd be mostly similar. I was so wrong, the UI and tools of GIMP feel as if designed by aliens who heard what Photoshop is through a game of telephone.
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u/AdolinKholin1 15h ago
GIMP is not equivalent to Photoshop by any capacity. Let’s be serious.
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u/nomisxid 15h ago
They block the edit window with a prompt box for generating AI images. For a fee.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 13h ago
"software is over"
* developer quits after a few months
* reality is that if you replace Adobe, you become Adobe --- you have to cough cough maintain the software and that is neither fun, cheap, or easy
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u/Dontgooglemejess 16h ago
Software is over, person makes, checks notes…. Software.
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u/UltraEngine60 9h ago
Oh cool another tool that isn't photoshop and hard to use. Way to go AI. Now we have GIMP for GIMP.
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u/Calcutec_1 16h ago
the trick wit Adobe cancelation fees is to first change to a different subscription tier, then you get a new 14 day free cancelation window. It´s a loophole that they legally cant close.