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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o1o1o1 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Please don't take offence by this, but:

If AI models can generate designs faster and produce work that is "good enough", what is the actual future of design tools and the design profession in your opinion?

I've tested this myself with some frontier models and the results are kinda impressive enough that it raised the question if design skills are already obsolete. If that is the case, what use are these tools now?

	▲	31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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lifeisloving an hour ago | parent | prev | 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.

	▲	jasomill 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Doesn't clean room typically apply to cases where the "dirty" team has legitimate access to copyrighted code, like the IBM PC BIOS which was published in the technical reference manual, and uses this access to write a functional specification for the "clean" team? I'm not sure how clean room would apply to commercial applications distributed in binary form, as there's no way to look at even disassembled code without violating the license agreement and therefore being in breach of contract and subject to potential copyright infringement claims for copying or even continuing to use the software, let alone cloning it, and surely you're not going to be subject to a copyright claim based on familiarity with the application from merely using it.
	▲	shinyoo 37 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I agree. The vast amount of data ingested and internalized by LLMs has effectively been "laundered". But they are so powerful and evolving so fast that no one can be spared of their impact. We have to to learn to live with it. Traditional proprietary software being "laundered" is just one part of the broader story...
	▲	echelon an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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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sheeshkebab 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How do you know llms you are using were not trained on decompiled apps?

	▲	Fizz43 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		why would that matter? That sounds like a problem between Adobe and the AI companies.

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idiotsecant 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The death of IP in the west. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows. Definitely the start of something big though.

	▲	angusturner a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Mightn't be so bad if all the value wasn't being captured by trillion dollar corps, despite them benefiting off the labor and creativity of countless non consenting individuals

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nico an hour 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 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I prefer the word *laundering
	▲	Iolaum 39 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		LLM's have already trained on similar enough code