I wonder if this is why I've seen a lot videos popping up on my youtube feed related to vibe coded clones of various commercial apps in the past few days. Everything from clones of flagship products from Adob to Microsoft Office.

Adobe product clones like Photoshop and Illustrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFB79TYI-Vw

Adobe after effects clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mi_tYSdkWQ

MS Office suite clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_jTYMOlXio

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chiengineer3 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I built a from scratch rust RAW processing engine similar to the brains behind photoshop and lightroom - its much more powerful and its not even complete yet

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echelon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, we explicitly do not use reverse engineering. We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (inspired by Photoshop)

https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft (inspired by Word)

https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft (one of the more mature apps)

https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (another app close to 1:1 parity)

(etc.)

Using REA for something as high profile as what we're doing is likely to result in lawsuits. We're doing everything we can by the books.

We cannot look at Adobe sources. Use of Ghidra is disallowed.

REA is probably great for personal apps and for abandonware, but I think if you publish the results and it's found to have decompiled the original proprietary sources in discovery, you might be in for a bad time.

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lifeisloving 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Using an LLM is not a clean room, imo. Its just IP laundering. Which is fine I guess if everyone is doing it, including the companies you're stealing from. I just dont know what the implications will be for progress.

Licensing/copyrighting encouraged people to think up of new things, and new ways of doing something. Now we're just all copying eachother.

	▲	echelon 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is novel Rust/egui code that I imagine looks nothing like Adobe code. I've never seen their code, but it must be a mess of old C++, right? It's considerably faster than their apps (at startup) too.

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nico 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The AI labs already figured it out:

1) reverse engineer the code 2) train a model on the code 3) use the model to write the clean code

Step 2 is the key “cleaning” process

So maybe a good strategy would be to use something like REA, put it on GitHub, wait for the LLMs to train on it, then just use the frontier models

	▲	lifeisloving 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I prefer the word *laundering

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socializer an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Probably not, there's relatively little secret sauce to something like Photoshop. It's just a lot of grungy work that, I guess, you can now delegate to an agent if you have enough money and time.

As an aside, I've heard a lot of hot takes about how this is the end of Adobe, but I'm pretty sure it misses the point. The main reason people pay Adobe is because it's a familiar line of stable, well-supported, interoperable, and actively-developed products. There's already plenty of cheaper or free alternatives (Davinci Resolve for video, Capture One / Darktable for raw, Affinity for photo editing and vector drawing, etc), and if Adobe survived that, I sincerely doubt they're going to lose pro customers to a vibecoded app where half the stuff is probably subtly broken or left as a TODO, and that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.

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echelon 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

> that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.

Longbets 1 week, haha.

We're working our asses off on this.

Most of the team are artists who use these tools actively and we want the replacements for ourselves. I'm a filmmaker, so you can imagine my frustration of being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee".

	▲	lewelove 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You're doing God's work. Keep it up! PhotoCraft is really cool, and the pace of stabilizing progress is incredible! Don't listen to people who dismiss your work without getting their hands on it.

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rchase an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

yep. it is unexpectedly everywhere. like, overnight.