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Comment by hypfer | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried using the clones (in an airgapped VM, please)?

Because I did and it's the playable allegory of the cave but in vibecoded rust.

I mean...have you? Presumably from copies you built yourself. As someone who long carried a Creative Cloud subscription, I am astonished at how much functionality is there already.

The Photoshop clone absolutely fulfills my needs immediately: Basic cropping, adjustments, tone mapping, occasional blur/filter type functionality, etc. Well I did "vibe code" in HEIC and JXL import and export functionality (shelling out to the platform heic and jxl libraries in sandboxes for both open and export), but holy shit, it is quite simply amazing, and it gives me a consistent interface I'm accustomed to. And it built and runs superbly on Linux too!

It absolutely isn't 100%, or even 50% in many cases, with some apps more than others. Like the Acrobat clone is fantastic for the basics like moving pages around, filling out forms, etc, but real editing is a mess. I needed the ability to change z-order and move elements so I had Claude add that in moments.

I mean, I get that people like being world weary and cynical, but these "vibe coded" projects are astonishing, and they are a bellwether that absolutely nothing is as it was.

I have no doubt these tools are useless for hardcore Illustrator users, or so on, but countless CC subscribers only touch the surface of features, and in days this already satisfies that.

> (in an airgapped VM, please)

Why the fear-mongering, out of curiosity? It's a give-us-attention from a real business (ArtCraft) with a long running product, not some weird hacker group releasing binaries on a torrent. Cloning and building the product is trivial. Lots and lots of eyes are looking at this project right now, and thus far I've heard not an iota of concern.

FWIW, I did my own once-over of the project, and then had Fable and Opus 5.5 do an end to end, and there is nothing concerning about it that I've seen

> Why the fear-mongering, out of curiousity?

I agree wholeheartedly. People download commercial software as if it doesn't have a history of deliberate backdoors and spyware (in the news now: A coffee pot that's basically trying to hack its customer's LANs, to spy on them. And recently a TV that spied on your media and possibly even your living room as a whole), but fearing a vibe coded Photoshop?

Sure, if it were a vibe coded webserver taking connections on the Internet, but it's not.

I have. The "Lightroom" is already better than Darktable, after what, 11 days?

Edit: Ok, so instead of downvoting me, could people reply with how you disagree? I am expecting downvotes for trolling and unhelpfulness, but not for "I don't like that what you said is your true experience".

I have literally tried to migrate to Darktable, and it's just not up to snuff. But I tried rawmakase (which is on like day 11) and it literally is.

Mate its been a couple of days, I would think you'd be mad to expect perfection from an LLM reverse engineering job straight away.

As a proof of concept however it shows that we are at the stage where any malicious actor has a very low barrier to entry to cause large scale corporate espionage etc.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

It's easy to create a set that looks as if it was a real city. It's infinitely more hard to create that real city.

But you're absolutely right that a set is all it needs for all sorts of (cyber) attacks.

Do you mean that bad actors can reverse engineer photoshop and hack its users or that bad actors can whip out plausible photoshop clone with vulnerabilities and backdoors and hack users with that?

I mean that proprietary software can be reverse engineered, there are many ways that this can affect vendors and end users. Both your examples could be some attack vectors.

Think more broadly than Adobe and any company that relies on a software product could have their business model destroyed overnight. More broadly than that, you could rupture trust between suppliers and vendors if they don't know who's really making requests from a proprietary platform that's been compromised unknowingly.

But thats just good old hacking, you can already see where software connects and try to see if you can get in.

I'm much more worried about AI made software that is developed so quickly that nobody knows what it does, pdfcraft was published a week ago and it has had 5 releases since then.

Oh I obviously know that this kind of thing is already achievable, but it's the barrier to entry is getting substantially lower... Instead of needing a nation state actor that's got funding and resources behind them, we're getting close to the point that some degenerate kid in their bedroom could say "hey claude find me the api keys and services behind nasdaq and build me an interface that spoofs transactions to XYZ". Or send commands to traffic light controllers. Or every third transaction from XYZ bank on every second day has one cent transferred to this other account.

Not just api calls but the business logic too.

Laymens thoughts there, but in essence this is my concern. People just looking at any old service in the world and going "hey claude build me a hook into this" and the models are getting close enough to being able to find and decompile the right moving parts on its own.

It isn't quite accurate to say that it was reverse engineered, though that claim is appearing across a lot of social media (including people claiming it disassembled it, etc).

It is a clone, where an LLM built facsimiles of interfaces and functions to the greatest degree possible. Which is a very different process.

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