Dude was like “write me a diatribe about AI arguing why coding agents don’t make sense”
They are not. CEOs are.
That would be fair, but leadership decides who to cut, so... here's your belongings, please be out of the building by noon.
Yes, building something as complicated and locked in as Microsoft Word required a lot of work, and Microsoft has gained considerable money and power over it, but that doesn't mean that Word is necessarily good.
No different from "McDonald's hamburgers are objectively very good."
For a while I thought it was annoying that Word wanted to save my documents in the cloud but then I realized I could keep my lifestyle diary for my nutritionist in Word and update it on my iPad on the go and it works great.
This is a pretty biased take. If there is anything the world is finally learning, it is that being completely dependent (not only for functionality but also availability) on a single vendor operating from a potentially uncooperative government, is not a great position to be in.
Most of the revenue for Adobe is not due to individuals who need a competent standalone tool. It’s for organizations that need all of the usual qualities:
1) continuity with prior work (my old projects open properly, last year’s training is still relevant)
2) being able to hire/train employees on the tool
3) collaborating externally
4) interoperability across work products (eg vector, raster, video, etc)
You are not getting any of that from someone’s vibe coded weekend project.
Ai models are not up to the task of a complete replacement. Humans are still needed and I don't see this changing. The "news worthy" cases of open source replacement are not in fact usable alternatives, missing features or having serious bugs. Anyone who has pushed on the models and vibe coding knows they have their limits around problem complexity - and that it takes an experienced practitioner in the subject Ai is being applied to in order to get good results.
If we assume that this is indeed true, that would mean AI companies will go bankrupt, leaving a lot of hardware to be rented for cheap. Isn’t it something that would benefit the community?
Or maybe they’ll find the next vertical and just move there now that “software is solved”
What keeps Adobe up at night, for better or for worse, is not that somebody is going to make a product that imitates what Photoshop used to be but that somebody is going to come out with a much better tool for AI driven editing and generated images.
No, someone still has to pay the subscription. AI Labs don't care who uses the tokens and how. If Adobe goes under someone else is going to take their place. Suprise, surprise: they will also use tokens.
> It’s a very expensive way of shooting yourself in the foot and sending the bill to your investors. <CoreWeave bonds chart>
I'm not sure how CoreWeave bond chart is even remotely relevant here. They are not even an investor.
> They are just mining the asteroid, dumping the silver onto the market for $20, and watching the price of their own product plummet to zero.
The lab's own product is the model. How is someone building a weekend project going to plummet the value of their model? It's the opposite!
I'm skeptical. It's not easy to capture all of the behavior of piece of professional software that has evolved for decades. There are already dozens of cheaper (and free) less-capable photoshop clones that haven't taken over the market.
I suspect the bigger issue with Adobe's business is that generative AI is quickly replacing the graphic artist. The replacement for Photoshop isn't PhotoCraft, it's a prompt.
I think that’s one of the things that’s jumped out at me in this latest slop wave from the last few weeks. Part of releasing meaningful software is the time investment by the creator is at least the barest of assurances that it’ll get some kind of support going forwards. Obviously not always, but the bigger the scope the more likely that is I think. If somebody spends 6 months on a project then it means it was worth at least 6 months to them and I believe there’s a higher chance they will continue to support it.
With stuff like this, it’s unusable and unmaintainable, and it got crapped out so fast that the creator has absolutely no emotional or personal investment in it beyond the token costs. I’m not suggesting every project needs a minimum amount of time spent on it, but it’s certainly a factor in how I judge software now, and choose what I want to interact with.
The substack popup to join and follow the author made me giggle: Why would I join that substack to read that "author" when I already have multiple free AIs that can give me the same take, but without all the waffle?
In the past, I might have signed up to read the author (I have signed up to a few authors before), but if all the author has to offer is basically already available to me for free, why would I join up?
Ultimately Photoshop as an idea stopped creatively evolving and Adobe created a tenuous pricing scheme that disincentivized competition, locked in users, and made most customers resentful. What this taught many of us is that this is a cautionary tale.
Mind you Adobe could have made CC free, built a healthy ecosystem around it, and created a lot of value in network effects, standards, plugins, etc. But they chose the dark path and they deserve to pay for it.
Why is there not yet fully open models made by/for the FOSS community (as opposed to open weight by entrepreneur-style companies)? Cost of training? But what is this cost really?
- Do not include costs of running model in cloud - Do not include IP costs - Do not include salaries, marketing, etc. (all these are separate expenses, different depending on individual goals)
There would be pre- and post- training "systems" that could be repeated.
Training data/acquisition could be separated out (so IP-liabilities could be taken on by individuals).
The idea would be a system for small groups/individuals to snap together the different aspects of training (data, pre-training, training compute, post-training) and to train their own (and share).
Won't this soon come down to a few thousand dollars for models that run on modern consumer hardware?
Docs, OpenAPI schemas, web fetch, and scripts to understand the request/response are used by models today. It works for any API over time.
You don't rely on the model knowing about such things up front. You feed it the latest API documentation and then work off that.
Instead,
> For three years the pitch from the big AI model labs has been beautifully simple. Software engineers are the most expensive employees on Earth.
tgsovlerkhgsel•2h ago
"It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution."
It is a revolution. Free models are out there. The "toll booths" (software companies) might not survive, but if that's the case, that is the revolution: Because something that you had to pay a massive "toll" for is now essentially free. That might not help the AI companies but it will be a revolution for everyone else that had to pay the tolls, likely making everything cheaper and everyone better off.
(Yes, everyone. Even a very poor person in a highly developed European country lives better than a mildly rich person before the industrial revolution, and I'd say the average person lives at the levels even royalty could barely dream of.)
Even if this bites the AI labs and they don't survive, building software is not going to become significantly more expensive than it currently is with free models that are being sold at cost (barring something major like a global nuclear war), mainly because you can always continue to run the existing models on existing hardware even if progress were to magically stop.
ThrowawayR2•2h ago
As existing models become out of date, somebody has to pay the massive cost for training updated models to replace them, including, of course, the free models.
Arnt•1h ago
I need to fill in timesheets, which uses a proprietary API. Claude guessed and iterated until it found out how to use that API, and filling in those sheets is now much less bothersome. I only need to enter a password every three days instead of four times per day.
tintor•1h ago
Top models can search the web and read the API docs.
Opus 5.5, for example, can write zig code very well, even though there is very little zig code repos out there.
Training models (of same size) gets more efficient over time from combination of software, hardware, and infrastructure improvements, so retraining that open model to update it, will be cheaper and cheaper.
verdverm•33m ago
https://mimo.xiaomi.com/rl/
mejutoco•42m ago
verdverm•
chrismorgan•28m ago
Yesterday’s models produced okay small results, but unmaintainable large results. People bet that models would continue to improve, so that tomorrow’s model can fix today’s slop. This is a gamble, and it’s not clear yet whether it will pay off. If that progress stops for any reason, you end up stuck with a model that’s good at starting things, but not good at maintaining them, and a bunch of code that gets more and more expensive to maintain. https://maevyn.codes/decoherence is worth a read.
And that’s quite apart from the inherent decay due to information/reality drift.
emkoemko•18m ago