I don't think that's the direction this is going to take.

Replacing a mature app with an incredibly wide audience and a million use cases may or may not be possible, but what's actually happening is that people are making an app that does exactly what they want, and using it to solve their own needs.

Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data. No Excel required.

Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.

Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs.

What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.

Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.

Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.

Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.

Exactly this. I have an acquaintence who is a wine connoisseur and collector. He has done technical project management, but does not program himself. Over the course of several months, he has produced an app that manages a database of the wines he has.

It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional.

This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.

So LLMs are the 3d printers of software. Great for niche use-cases without enough market demand for a proper solution, and generally scale very poorly vs proper industrial processes.

We saw this happening for our SAAS stack we used, why pay for a massive SAAS tool with a huge surface area when we only used the desk+room booking and payment. Before building something like this was such a huge cost now it's becoming palatable

Those were never the users of photoshp. I guess canva will get a big hit due to this.

> How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.

As per https://xkcd.com/1015/, I suspect many people are doing this and the artists hate all the examples even more than the average consumer who simply treats it as a sign of low-budget work.

My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror.

Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p...

That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.

So it is the AI image workbench tools like ComfyUI.

I don't think many people subscribe to photoshop for just occasional image edits. It's very much a tool mostly used by professionals that do a lot of it

Why do you need the AI to write a script? Why not have the AI do the work without a "script"?

I don't think you understand Photoshop and its business if you think people are replacing it with ChatGPT or Gemini... the point of the article is that the whole "SaaS is dead and AI killed it" media narrative is bs propelled by the ai hype cycle.