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Comment by variety8675 | Hacker News Reader

The media response to this omits the fact that these vibe coded "reverse engineered" apps hardly work and we've had open source alternatives to the Microsoft and Adobe products for years. The narrative they're pushing is a frontier model can make a perfect clone of any app, and the reality is it makes a ui that looks somewhat similar but none of the functionality actually works.

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Hah, Potemkin Office Suite. Next, Potemkin OS and Potemkin phones?

Maybe that's many are convinced AI can replace developers, they can only see the surface of software and think there's not much more underneath it...

In the case of Microsoft Office native desktop applications the LLMs can figure out everything underneath through a mix of decompiling the binaries, reading the product documentation, and exploratory testing. Some SaaS is more opaque.

This is not true, most software can't be reverse engineered even if you had all of the source code, much less if you just have the binary.

Functionality piles on top of each other, products are such a garbled mess with fixes built on top of shaky grounds all over.

20% of software is code, 30% is design/strategy/marketing/telemetry/usage, rest of the 50% is lots and lots of stuff baked into software from user feedback over the decades.

Any software product that isn't in a similar balance is just crap to use, for instance Windows it's 20-30% code, 60-70% marketing/ads and the rest 10-20% bug fixes..

There is 0 user feedback being addressed.

In my opinion, AI is the thing that should be a wake up call for software companies to actually build on top of feedback proactively and with sharp intent.

I don't think you've been paying attention to what's happened in the last few months. The LLMs have gotten way better at reverse engineering and design. They might not be great at building a whole new product from scratch but cloning an existing mature application will be no problem within a year at most.

I work in a neolab/ai product company with LLMs all day. If I don't know what's been happening I am really not sure who does.

> but cloning an existing mature application will be no problem within a year at most

Good luck and please notify us about the progress.

Potemkin == Omarchy

I don’t trust anything made by DHH now. He merged a PR that rewrote ttfx from rust to Claude generated asm (despite contributor objections) and then turned around and merged another that rewrote all of that into rust.

Which is to say that a normal organization would not be changing things so quickly based on the whims of a single individual.

Maybe I’d be ok to use omarchy just for fun, but could never use it seriously in any capacity.

Do you have a link for me?

https://github.com/omacom/ttfx/pull/35

Don't kick the man so hard. It must be at that point he discovered that ASM is not actually portable across CPU architectures.

The narrative has a point. The LLMs are getting very good at this task. I got 95% of functionality by using LLM to port our Qt desktop app to thin web client and web server. Astra medium, two prompts, 2 hours of LLM processing. Each of two LLM plans had about ten steps. The missing step for porting of these apps is to test against the original (ex. Ms office) app in the plan.

The alternatives have always been crap and unusable and incompatible with actual professional software and this is coming from someone who loathes Windows/Adobe and tried very hard for more than a decade to not rely on Windows-only products. I know, Microsoft doesn't respect its own specs, the maintainers do a heroic job, it's free, etc. Still doesn't change the usability issues, and they've been going on for literal decades.

Funnily enough, two common retorts against criticism of user-centric open source software are:

>stop complaining and feel free to open a PR if you're unsatisfied

Seems like many maintainers are now getting what they wished for and they are somehow unhappy about it. Ooops

>feel free to start your own project

Seems like the artcraft dude literally just did that and people are somehow unhappy about it. Ooops

> The alternatives have always been crap

LibreOffice is actually fine for 99% of all paper pusher workloads. The only office app that can claim superiority is Excel.

I don't know but this WordCraft works perfectly fine hasn't crashed on me and has 90% of the features already there.

Not to mention it's single binary barely 80 MB and super fast to start and very snappy.

Have you tried that or that PDFCraft?

Yeah though FWIW, the overall impact of companies realizing maybe they shouldn't be spending $100k a year on a document editor is likely to raise all boats for alternatives.

It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.

i dont think anyone thinks it's worth that on its own, but you need some kind of user management (entra id in this case), some kind of cloud storage (sharepoint in this case) and some kind of standard document format (docx, xlsx, pptx in this case) in any company.

of course you can do all that with open source stuff but office is just easy to buy and hard to get rid of once you have bought in. the bigger your company the harder it is to migrate.

Entra ID is separate if you don't want logins from Nigeria. One of the most insane-to-me things is Office 365 is basically "open access by default" and you have to pay $6/month/user to fix it. Most people don't realize just how much attack surface they open up moving their data to the cloud, and that it costs a lot to even start to get back towards a secure environment like you had on-premise.

But yeah, the lock-in effect is huge. Microsoft cloud products deliberately don't work well with anything but more of their own cloud products. And as soon as you start a migration to it based on what you need, you suddenly realize how much other stuff you also need to pay them for. And you can't escape without replacing all of it.

I think a lot of people forget about the labor costs of migrating. The $30/mo looks cheap compared to all of the time spent trying to teach end users how to use something else

Part of the potential of these vibe coded clones is that the UI and workflows will be very similar to the genuine Microsoft products. So if they're actually completed and debugged then a migration won't necessarily require end user retraining.

Paying for software is perfectly fine. If people don’t want to pay for office there isn’t a lack of alternatives at all. Google doc is right here for them to use of they want a free cloud version.

The idea that companies with subscriptions are extorting users is cancerous nonsense

You've fallen prey to the "Everyone is stupid except me" fallacy.

By the time you add cloud-storage space integration (SharePoint), live collaborative editing, support hotline, support for 30 year old macros, and Active directory user integration, you'll be charging the same per seat.

But hey, proof me wrong please. Code it.

> support hotline

Have you... ever tried talking to Microsoft support?

Also wake me up when there’s a cloud version that works in an even vaguely similar way.

The Office advantage is a suite of apps and integrations with their cloud offerings. That’s their big moat against vibe-coded apps, because few vibe-coders want to maintain a SaaS service for Office files and even fewer CIOs want to commit their company to use that service when Microsoft exists and is proven to work.

> Also wake me up when there’s a cloud version that works in an even vaguely similar way.

NextCloud has had an office suite offering for many years.

The web versions are passable, but the native versions are non-extant, and the handoff story leaves much to be desired. You can’t, say, have one person editing native and one person editing on web.

Looking at the website they seem to mention a web version: https://getartcraft.com/ (I haven’t tried though)

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