Clean room implementation of Adobe products | Hacker News Reader

Clean room implementation of Adobe products

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25 pointsderac30 comments

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"clean room" with AI is impossible

Oh it's even hallucinating a non-existing FreeBSD version. Perfect slop.

>Installers for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web are attached to each GitHub release

>On FreeBSD 14 (x86_64), the release has a tarball

>photocraft-<version>-freebsd-x86_64.tar.gz

If this is even 50% functional its going to have an impact on adobe revenue.

Would be amazing to this these tools in Linux distros.

There have always been Adobe alternatives and many are more than 50% functional.

True.

Even if this isn't perfect, with each frontier coding model release we get closer and closer to small teams one-shotting complex software like this.

I'm certainly not going to hold Adobe stock long-term.

> one-shotting complex software like this

You mean one shotting slop that barely works and lacks mature software stability with decades of fixes/features and improvements? No serious professional would ever use something like that. Like I’m the first to join the party if there is any hate to put on Adobe, but their closed source platform isn’t going anywhere. Only a paradigma shift could

> slop that barely works and lacks mature software stability with decades of fixes/features and improvements

Sounds like Creative Cloud to me.

That just tells you how much care they put on this stuff, which is the same amount of care you will find on vibe coded stuff

I don't get how people are still denying what's happening in front their eyes to this day. "Slop that barely works" isn't holding up as much, model output even in the hands of novices is drifting away from the "slop" moniker quickly. I downloaded .2 a day ago and none of the preferences worked, .3 just now fixed more than half. 3 years ago we had a mangled mess of Will Smith eating spaghetti and now audiovisual content is more or less solved... age old adapt or get left behind.

> I downloaded .2 a day ago and none of the preferences worked, .3 just now fixed more than half

yeah pretty much a joke, you just shifted down the quality bar

Thanks for convincing me to try it. It works amazingly well. I don't need full suite, just occasional picture editing.

How this thing only 82MB???

Uhm struck a nerve eh?

We're one major LLM release away from being able to spit out _the whole adobe suit_ in a single prompt, while being safer, faster, and more featureful. I wonder at what point will tech companies stop interrogating candidates on useless Leetcode problems.

The stark contrast between HN comments and everywhere else makes me think HN may be one of the last places left for grounded technical discussion.

Everyone on Twitter is acting as if Adobe’s software was decompiled, rewritten, and that’s it—game over, without even trying the damn thing. Seeing software engineers themselves espouse this nonsense is particularly annoying.

Yes, AI can recreate photoshop. But Photoshop is the product of thousands of tiny design, engineering, and product decisions. The idea that all of those decisions can simply be “decoded” from compiled binaries is laughable.

> But Photoshop is the product of thousands of tiny design, engineering, and product decisions. The idea that all of those decisions can simply be “decoded” from compiled binaries is laughable.

I actually think a couple passes with AI through the product will cover 80+ % of the use-cases people will have and people will have no problem switching to the new thing.

New thing that sooner or later will nuclearize your work. This is disposable software and any disposable software doesn’t carry any accountability regarding your work

The worst thing that can happen is a photoshop file save gets corrupted. You can mitigate that completely with backups.

Here's my technically grounded response:

As far as I understand, inspecting the compiled binaries in any way would violate clean-room principles. At a minimum you'd need (A) one set of agents documenting the behavior of the executing binaries, e.g. manipulating the UI, and reviewing documentation and training manuals, and (B) a second set of agents whose only input is the output of the first set of agents. I'm not sure whether testing the real and AI generated agent side by side with equivalent inputs would constitute clean-room, although it might be legal.

I agree that a large part of the value of a product stems from "thousands of tiny design, engineering, and product decisions." But I don't agree with your conclusion. If the goal is to replicate the behavior of an existing piece of software then all you need to do is observe the behavior and replicate it. You don't need to engineer it in the same way, or arrive at it by making the same engineering and design decisions. Of-course in the end all you have is the replica, not the engineering and design heritage, product management, or the teams to carry the work forward. But that is the same problem open source "clones" of commercial products have often suffered from.

The folks acting like this on Twitter are likely Omarchy man-o-sphere folks

Are we doing a daily thread now?

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981449

Is there any interest in a C++ rewrite of Adobe products? A pure Rust implementation essentially holds back portability and control massively, while C++ allows you to control and account for every single bit of memory.

how was this achieved? Is this group super well funded? Is this just Claude churning for 3 months?

Based on how non-functional it is I would say Claude churning for a weekend or less.

So probably not really clean room.

Already ArtCraft :D

This was the result of a _single_ prompt. Which actually shows the power of modern LLMs. I already have a from scratch C++ implementation of Photoshop, in my own custom UI toolkit, with my own custom GPU shaders. From scratch. Whole thing, ported over and I started last night. In preliminary benches it's roughly ~20-40% faster than their Photoshop rewrite. Will start heavy optimization passes and see how hard I can push it.

Can I ask what such a prompt looks like? Is it more along the lines of "implement all the features of Photoshop" or a detailed list of all the features that should be implemented?

"never crash" https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/AGENTS.md

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