Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones

The developer may be making extreme claims. But, there is a sliver of cold truth hiding behind it.

The LLMs are so adept at pattern matching and combining so many bits and pieces of engineering knowledge that they can now easily take over this aspect of software engineering- “using existing building blocks to build out a tool or service”.

A liberation of software tools and services. See something you like? Build it for yourself just the way you like it. There is no moat in tools and software anymore. The new reality whether one likes it or not is that anybody can replicate your software and they most likely will. Not even the “assets” you guard and let only _your_ services access because LLMs can scrape relentlessly, fill-in the gaps and get good enough to be a viable alternative.

The only moat left are in hardware, hardware adjacent software, and services that wield genuine network effects to be useful.

I have a simpler way to achieve the same result: copying the Photoshop binaries and auxiliary files while cracking copy protection.

I'm only half joking. Whenever one of these vibe-copies start to become popular, it will be sued to oblivion. We could use AI to build Adobe alternatives, but these low effort projects won't be how we do it.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850 (3 days ago, 209 comments)

Interesting times. In the past, small software companies had to worry about big companies cloning their products overnight. Now, even the big software companies have to worry about LLM-driven imitators doing the same to them.

> Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe’s well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.

I hope he has good lawyers