Congratulations to everyone who made this company go. That said, this company's growth seems threatened by AI adoption rather than boosted by it.
There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.
Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers
Turs out people don't want "quick dump as HTML" but rather "maintainable, understandable, performant HTML". I don't see how that has changed with AI.
But like no-code or low-code, the niche in which it's useful to a business is limited. I commonly say that if software (esp FLOSS) serves even only one person well, it's a success. By that criteria, it was massively successfull.
But 27 years later, we are still mostly writing "html" (or jxl, or whatever todays frontendframework has come up with) by "hand". Or writing code that churns out this HTML for us. And not dragging around stuff in Dreamweaver.
Some figma-export will serve niches, some of which I probably cannot imagine even. Prototyping, one-offs, cousin-erik-building-james-craft-brewery-site, etc. But even combined with generative- or transformative AI, it won't serve as the source for UI "code".
The problem with Dreamweaver is that you still needed a developer to upload and run the site. And back then, you couldn’t run single page applications (web stacks hadn’t evolved that far yet), so still needed developers to write the backend.
Thus there wasn’t a huge amount to gain in using Dreamweaver for the professional world.
AI has changed that in that it doesn’t have the same limitations as Dreamweaver. However, like yourself, I don’t think we’ll see AI replace developers. Or at least the current crop of LLMs still have a long way to go before they can be used without developer oversight.
Edit: also worth noting that Flash was everywhere back then too. So many web designers opted for Flash instead.
Building stuff from scratch is easy. AI can do it, dreamweaver could, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, etc.
Maintaining legacy isn't. AI isn't there yet: at most it can replace existing with new, but it cannot "understand" context, history, The Reason Why Kevin Built This Weird Unintelligable Abstraction, or how the three different ways of validating an email are actually a business requirement.
Let alone building stuff that withstands the decay of real constraints and time.
I've been around long enough (30+ years software dev/engineer) to have seen this decay over and over and to know what works and what doesn't (It's a people issue, hardly a technical one).
I've never seen AI, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, or any low- or no-code tool, amongst which Dreamweaver, churn out something that's easy to change, maintainable for months, years, decades.
There's software that gets a few hours a year of attention and keeps running, securely, performant. That can be picked up, changed or added to and deployed in hours. And there's software that will explode the moment you even glance at the files, let alone anyone fixing, updating, or g*d forbid, adding features to.
AI generated stuff almost exclusively falls in the last category. And we don't have anything AI around yet that can do this fixing, updating, adding features for us.
So currently it successfully replaces many of the code monkeys, fiverr-freelancers and junior devs churning out forever-greenfield-projects. But little else.
A junior can never be that, due to lack of the experience. But too many long-term developers haven't failed, or haven't learned from these mistakes.
For example, about five years ago, I worked a few months with a 40+ years-of-experience software developer, who worked almost his entire life on one single product (in C++ and Java) in one company, solo. I was asked to assess if/how it was possible to get new people for this project because he was retiring. Part of the code was marvelous and a true beauty. Other parts were horrors or inintelligable mess. He truly did not like Java (at first) so a giant part of the java codebase was there to make it look-and-feel somewhat like his (also non-standard) C++.
Ironically, the nice parts were those that were hardly touched or changed - infrastructure, boilerplate, etc. But the worst parts were those that needed frequent changes due to business demands or the ever changing outside world. He honestly never realized that there were patterns and systems (by now), to keep software manageable under real-world-demands and changes. That turned also to be the saving of this project: he loved "DDD" and "Design Patterns" (both he heard about, but never dove into), and implemented some core ideas in this project before handing it over: anti-corruption-layers, ports-adapters, dependency-injection, testing.
[0] https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1075741140914731351/s...
Anyone with good SwiftUIfu care to take over? Then hopefully jsx-lite gets submitted to the ES specs like E4X. Then we can have UI write once and runs in all places.
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
There may be no moats. Just distribution winners.
Figma is a whole lot easier to replace actually you can now actually with a self host OSS that came up with and bring your own api key from antrophic or open ai
*acting like web world is not broken half the time
are you sure that these people don't exist???
talk about arrogant
Are you in design? How does increasing complexity benefit you personally?
what else do you think they do that ????
and Yes I do design, not only just operate but learn money with it professionally
I know you just ragebaiting
Adobe is going to get absolutely trounced by GenAI. They've got so many competitors coming at them from all angles.
Also, innovation capital (engineers at startups) experience outsized rewards at startups when disruption happens. The better engineers will flock to more nimble outfits and reap the benefits.
Adobe is a dinosaur.
I wish for some real competition in this space, but it will take a LOT of effort to dethrone Adobe. My 2c.
Adobe has RunwayML, Midjourney, and a hundred other startups chasing after them.
The number of things you can do without Adobe is increasing every day.
Yes, and it's not clear that those startups will fare better than gimp.
Adobe spends inordinate amount of effort to understand the problems that users are solving and make UX that users love. As the result Adobe has tons of money to improve the product. Users curse its business practices, white an occasional "goodbye Adobe" or "FU" messages but keep buying subscriptions.
The moat around this should not be underestimated. My 2c.
The new breed of tools can already do your Adobe workflow. There simply is nothing for Adobe to add to the table.
Adobe had a huge moat for image and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. Now it's easy for anyone to models up to a new UX and deliver 90% of the useful surface area of Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy. That's not how editing of the future will work.
Besides, the number of creators is going to increase by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. Those creators are growing up on new tools. Adobe is stuffy. Someone using CapCut is never going to download Adobe Creative Cloud.
This game is already lost.
I am not sure. I heard the same arguments from the gimp crowd for years. But they always kept talking about solving their own problems (programmatic changing of imagery for web development), not the problems creative, non programmer users had and were willing to pay for solving (interactive manipulation based on visual feedback, which is how many creative types tend to work). They vehemently opposed improvements that were critical for hobbyists and professionals, like insisting on staying with 8-bit colors forever.
As a result, 25+ years later, gimp is a niche tools with its main draw being that it is free. Adobe spent a lot of time understanding workflows of target users.
When I, a pure hobbyist, work on my photos in Photoshop my feeling is immediately "ah, it really does what I want". As much as I hate Adobe business practices I gladly pay their subscription ransom to have Photoshop when I process my travel pictures.
I am not sure the new crowd understands paying users (and not "I will use it for free and watch ads" folks) any better than gimp used to. But I wish them luck. My 2c.
I got to talk to a product engineer about some of their work back in 2021, and he was describing generative (and even generative-editive) capabilities they had in hand that most associate with the last two years, they were just figuring out how to productize them, many of which they have.
I have my own complaints about Adobe products and choices but they are far from out of the game, and they’re probably going to be fine, especially if a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of them primarily as a dinosaur Figma competitor.
MongoDB wants a word.. another "this will never amount to anything" HN special.
AI tools are still just that tools - they're not abstraction layers from "intent" to "production product".
adobe tried this 10 years ago (Adobe dream weaver) and failed
I literally can drag and drop design photos from drawing board to claude or open ai chat and they recreate it themselves instead of needing figma
not sure where you know that "we are cooked" its for them not us
The difference here is - Adobe tried using a proprietary stack. Figma can spit React. Everyone knows React - even if you use something else. It’s perfect timing with AI coding agents and every, single, UX team using it.
You can literally do this NOW without needing figma
like literally require minimal effort, like do you think this designer so "technology" ill ??? so they need the chatbox and preview page directly into the same page?