After coding exclusively with AI tools since February, Thomas said he foresees a near future when everyday developers can re-create open source versions of popular paid software to “take back the internet and own tech forever.”
“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 is full on delulu if he think using big tech AI trained on stolen material is gonna free them from big tech enshittification. Actual free, open souced software is always there for people to looked at, majority of people doesn’t need specific function on their software, they just need a software available right away without any tweak.
If they are using paid AI they are just transferring the dynamic from the paid software companies to the paid AI companies as no one will truly understand these apps and be able to maintain them without using AI.
And that’s the AI industry endgame. A world where developers are no more and people can only get software tools or apps from them by paying insane fees.
They want this for everything, not just software. Skillsets, knowledge bases, web searching, reasoning and logic.
They flat out admitted that with statements like “we want intelligence to be a commodity that people buy from us”.
They are fascism-craving sociopaths. That’s it.
Yeah like that’s all well and good while people use AI to functionally decompile and replicate specific existing pre-ai software. The problem is if you do that, eventually no one will make the software for you to clone.
Giving an AI a decompiled app or codebase and telling it to change xyz on it is something AI can do pretty competently because it’s just working with a framework human developers built for purpose. His assumption that new alternatives and software built from scratch using AI alone will make apps to a similar quality is not based in reality
“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.”
their “software” will not run on real hardware, it will run on the farts of heavenly transdimensional unicorns
“Bold AI developer” LMAO!
Reckless, careless, messy
Vibes ✌️
It’s both stupid and brave, so bold fits. Adobe will almost certainly want his head on a stack of legal documents.
Perhaps the biggest fundamental problem with using AI like this - how can you know the programs it generates are truly clean-room replicas? Can you guarantee Anthropic never trained their AI on Adobe’s suite or any of Adobe’s code?
Also, if you’re desperate to cut Adobe out of your life, why not use the open source tools that already exist and aren’t at risk of being sued out of existence by Adobe
Personally, I’ve found features of Adobe that FOSS has struggled to replicate.
I hate adobe, but am tethered to them for their cabailities with certificates and certificate verifications. Plus a bunch of the docs I use never quite render correctly in other software.
That said, if you’ve got any fresh recommendations, I’d love to hear them.
I think that you can reasonably defend yourself against those allegations. Even if Anthropic trained on some leaked Photoshop code, in most jurisdictions that should not matter. Software patents will, however, totally be an issue beause Adobe will have some patent on stupid features and send their lawyers
Blanket statement by AI bro?
Yawn.
Let’s gooooo
Fuck you, Adobe!
I tried the video editor and photo editor. Lot’s of missing features, but to give them credit the project isn’t even a week old from initial release. I don’t even think effects work at all in the video editor. Then, GIF support is totally broken/missing in the photo editor. But the base structure is there, but right now they’re more like simple programs dressed up as complex programs because of the amount of broken or missing feaures.
The problem with vibe coding is that progress is great at first, it can build out the basic structure of an application, a data layer, some functionality that works, etc. But as the application gets more complex, it really starts to struggle to add that complexity without it getting confused and throwing out stuff that works because it can’t get the new parts to work. Or it forgets a structure that has been implemented, and designs a whole new structure for each added part, so you end up with massive regressions, a Frankenstein’s monster of different styles and implementations, and a very inconsistent application that just feels wrong to use. And if you now need to go in to the code to improve it yourself, you’ll either hit a wall of your own ability, or you’ll spend all your time trying to fit the square peg into the round hole that the ai generated. A complex application like Photoshop will never be replaced in it’s entirety by a vibe coder, not without good engineers keeping everything in check for the long term.
Not to argue with you, as I observe the same issues with assisted coding. But as someone who uses Photoshop on and off (mostly off recently, Gimp is sufficient for my needs) for like 20 years, I have an impression that it’s mostly coded by people who do not care in the slightest of what they’re doing. Not to say enthusiastic about their job. I imagine there are many people working on Photoshop, and some of them are very professional and all, but most I believe are just there doing shitty job. It’s fucking mess, the Photoshop, and most (if not all) Adobe’s products.
So while I’m very sceptical, as the next guy is, I believe we may see the rise of the vibe coded alternatives. A decade ago, when I had a simple task that involves doing something with an image, I built my process around Photoshop. Today, I try to vibe code a standalone CLI thing that does one simple thing, as I need it. (Often, they’re wrappers for ImageMagick.) I can imagine someone more skilled taking it further and making a GUI for it, and I doubt that would be worse than what’s Photoshop is.
So, if the product would accumulate a momentum, a dedicated professional folks may actually come up and lead some things here and there. The clean room implementation is an obvious bullshit. But as much Adobe doesn’t care about the copyright and licenses, why would an average Joe care about some intellectual property that Adobe holds?
They professional folks could show up at the doors of Gimp, Krita, Inkscape. Which would be better. But I think all these projects has fundamental issues with their UIs, providing mediocre UX way too often. (But sometimes much better, so it’s not like it’s entirely broken.)
It’s the 80/20 principle.
Getting a piece of software done, the main work, the 80%, takes 20% of effort.
Refining the remaining 20% on the other hand takes 80% of all effort and time invested.
Another aspect is burnout. Sure, vibe coding means sped up development, but what I noticed was… I also lost interest in projects much quicker. Unless it directly delivers something I need - e.g. I’ve built a 3D printer stand for my new Bambu H2C - it’s going on the pile of “80% finished crap”.
And the thing is, you CAN build an AI setup that automates everything. I’ve put together a skill/agent/rule stack that is essentially an entire company’s engineering department. It works autonomously, only looping in the user for major decisions (and those decisions get a proper report the user can read to contextualise the decision itself). It creates initiatives, epics, then refines those into stories, then stories get planned with tasks, subtasks, etc., which then get the design-develop-test-verify loop (test here stands for test writing, while verify is the QA smoke test). Stories get the appropriate level of detail, with a BDD approach (so happy path, unhappy path, and edge case scenarios are defined before work begins), experts are created on-demand, the list goes on. All of this with 6-8-10 parallel teams.
It works incredibly effectively.
It also burns through tokens like there’s no tomorrow. I let it run over a weekend - Saturday morning to Sunday midnight. It correctly identified the project needs for a relatively small thing (something a sole developer would write over 2-3 months), created an appropriate enterprise approach, broke it down into 9 MVP stages, and in 2 days, delivered the first four of those.
At the cost of burning through an entire weekly allowance of Claude Max 20X tokens…
I guess I could pay another £150 for a secondary account and have it churn through my old projects to refine and finalise them, but it’s hardly worth the money.
And no, while I say that it’s a “full company”, it’s only because I am an actual software engineer, I understand the code being written, I understand the processes, the flows. It’s not something you can toss to a complete beginner and have them build a successful business on top.
With LLM it’s closer to 60/40, you can get an MVP in a day or two, but the next step is either impossible or so hard it will require so much resources that it makes it almost impossible. But if you start with a very clear idea of architecture and software stack - in that case you’ll get 80/20. Then the real problem starts - you don’t know your code, and have no idea how everything interacts and there going to be thousands or tens of thousands of lines of shit that does nothing or done something in the past that LLM forgot to remove, or it left a document that describes it so it won’t remove it and so on.
No, it’s not really closer to 60/40.
You can deliver the core of the product - the 80% - in the indicated 20% effort zone, aka a few days.
As for not knowing the code… I actually do read what’s being output. Just because I’m not familiar enough with the language or framework to write it myself with confidence, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand it.
Beyond that, the review loop I described above incorporates experts that are language/framework specific to spot issues. Static analysis can easily spot unused code paths - plus that gets covered by tests too, so any leftover is spotted. And even further, after each MVP cycle (which I use in place of sprints as sprints are for human effort cycles which LLMs don’t really have, so managing actual target goals instead of physical time periods makes more sense), I have a multi-model (as in, different models from different sources, not just e.g. “all Claude but using Sonnet, Opus and Fable”, but more like “Opus 5.5 and GPT 6.1 Sol and [insert currently best model for language]”) quorum of experts review the code, test it end to end, find unit/integration/e2e/UI test gaps, write up everything as big/chore tickets, and have another go of the main loop fix those. Same for documentation, it’s kept up to date in the same loops.
He’s not wrong I think and that is also because of corporate bureaucracy. At my job I have to jump through so many hoops to get a license for something like visio or powerbi and have to set reminders to open it regularly, because you lose them if you do not open them in a certain period. Nowadays I do not bother. I have whipped up a fancy report in R or a pretty diagram using mermaid in Codex much quicker thanI would be simply requesting a licence and justifying the cost to some corporate drone.
I’ve tried his photoshop clone and it really is impressive. Yes, it needs more work. Yes, there are rough edges. But for something that one (!) guy build in a few weeks while also building several other programs? Holy crap, that is awesome and also a little bit scary. That really is a usable copy of photoshop.
Are you really that impressed by a guy that ordered something else to build their idea?
Replace something with someone and you have an average company? I get that ai is bad in the long run, but screwing over big corps with their own weapons is kinda funny
And would you be impress with the worker that does the work or will you praise the CEO?
Oh my God, a developer that created a Photoshop clone in a week, that would be amazing! Of course I’d credit them, but I’d also credit the CEO of a company that was doing that. I mean, how many companies are going that?
Disregard the op, don’t agree with him.
In my case the worker. Then again, I live in a country with very good unions. In my company (50k+ employees) there is a lot of focus on showing what employees did and exchange programs with other companies by the creator.
You know, Steve Jobs invented and programmed the Mac, the iPhone, did everything for the iPad himself, programmed MacOS and created iTunes by himself. Elon Musk developed several rockets, multiple cars, his own AI and is an expert in building tunnels and hyperloops - according to people on the internet.
Haha, you might want to move that last sentence to the top. I think people are rage replying before they get to the end. (I nearly did)
You’re not exactly helping your point here.
Maybe not the best examples for the crowds around here. You might have a difficult time looking for someone who admires either of those two.
Yes, totally. First of all, that is not something your average guy from the street can do. Yes, the AI is doing some hard lifting here, but you need to have the idea, the motivation and the stamina to do something like that.
And let’s be honest: I would also be impressed by a guy hiring some software devs to build a FOSS photoshop clone in record speed.
First of all, that is not something your average guy from the street can do
Because the average guy from the street didn’t use photoshop…? Or have a claude subscription.
but you need to have the idea, the motivation and the stamina to do something like that.
That’s not exactly the stuff that hard to come by considering they’re literally cloning an app.
I would also be impressed by a guy hiring some software devs to build a FOSS photoshop clone in record speed.
I would too, considering the fact it’s build by human, and i would praise the team rather than Seeeoh McGuy.
Everything is open source now!
Companies have profited off FOSS long enough without a dime to spare, I think this is the least they can do.
It looks good but I honestly am hesitant to actually use it, it feels really weird to run/use something no human has full autonomy over.EDIT: Oh, I expected them to have decompiled parts of the adobe suite. First sentence makes less sense now.
