r/technology • u/FutureSuccess2796 • 15h ago
Software Developer who vibe-coded free Adobe clones reveals apps to take down Microsoft Office next — and says 'there is no reason to save broken software' | TechRadar
https://www.techradar.com/computing/office-suites/developer-who-vibe-coded-free-adobe-clones-reveals-apps-to-take-down-microsoft-office-next-and-says-there-is-no-reason-to-save-broken-software486
u/omniuni 14h ago
The issue is that there's no actual developer here. He's a developer who has set a bunch of Claude agents to the task of making these.
As it stands, every one of them is an absolutely buggy mess. Not just missing features, but extremely unreliable. The company, of course, is hoping that just letting the agents continue will fix everything in time.
That said, they have the money for now, and their business model (selling access to AI features to fund the maintenance) could work.
But, frankly, until at least one of their apps reaches a point where it is sufficiently stable, I remain doubtful that they will be more than a novelty of slop.
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u/TheSparrowDarts 14h ago
I truly don't understand how it's getting so much press. He just shat out this rubbish and tech press is jizzing over it like the second coming
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u/randompersonx 14h ago
It’s wishful thinking. People hate Adobe and wish this could replace it.
People also don’t know how real pros use this stuff, and therefore don’t understand the differences.
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u/regeya 12h ago
And there's always someone who points out that various open source projects already exist, and here on Reddit at least pointing out that the tools that exist are a poor substitute for someone who is doing pro-level work, the response is almost certainly going to be an angry, well then fork it and fix it.
Look man, I use the tools. If I had the chops to fix the current open source tools (and I'm purposely leaving out specific software names) I would be getting paid more to do that. Simple as that. But someone who has some creativity and just needs to whip something up real quick, those same open source tools are great for that.
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u/randompersonx 12h ago
Yep...
And speaking as someone who has built plenty of software projects over the years ... Building the code is a small portion of the total lifecycle of the software...
Supporting it and maintaining it are much larger issues.
Over time, there will be new operating systems and file formats that break things ... users will want new features and then the new features will have to fit into the edge cases of a million other pre-existing features and bug fixes...
IMHO, even if this software did eventually become superior to Adobe, it will still end up carrying a support contract for serious professional users ... and if it doesn't have a support contract, serious professional users won't be able to use it.
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u/pinkynarftroz 9h ago edited 9h ago
Yeah.
When you make enough by lunchtime to pay for your yearly Creative Cloud subscription, it matters far more that you can have a direct line to Adobe for support and even feature requests.
I'm in the film industry, and Adobe routinely is there for direct support, workflow guidance, and bug fixes. I once had an issue where Premiere was not reading the sensor crop data from open gate Arriraw correctly, and just got on the phone with a rep. They confirmed the bug, offered a temporary workaround, and it was fixed in the next update.
Nobody would leave anything important to these vibe coded clones that could break at any second without recourse.
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u/blow-down 14h ago
Yes very suspicious when actual alternatives like LibreOffice and iWork have existed for many years.
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u/Itz_Raj69_ 14h ago
All the press is people who've only used photoshop to crop their JPEGs. Anyone who actually uses these tools to even 25% of their potential knows how terrible this slop is
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u/turtleship_2006 13h ago
The glazing I've seen on some other subs of this dev and of claude makes me feel like I'm back on twitter
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u/Itz_Raj69_ 13h ago
I expected this from Instagram, but not reddit honestly.
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u/turtleship_2006 13h ago
I got heavily downvoted for suggesting this software would be unreliable for real world use lmao
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u/omniuni 14h ago
It's a combination of publicity and genuine desire.
Let's be clear, here. If this guy is right, and in a month these agents have fixed enough bugs that these apps really are stable and have all the features of the "real" ones, it will be incredible.
For me, Office isn't so big, but a fully functional and stable Adobe suite would be awesome.
But it takes some amount of experience in AI slop and software development to understand the difference between a messy first step, and making something actually stable and useful.
As impressive as it looks to have so much surface level, the problem is that it is likely that the architecture will be a real problem to the point that every bug will take exponentially longer to fix.
So a journalist sees "it has 98% of the features, it just needs to fix the bugs", and of course the company making this will encourage that view. As a developer I see "it has basically 0% of the features working fully indicating an inherent flaw that will likely prevent the bugs from ever being solved", and that flies in the face of both publicity and wishful thinking.
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u/Waste-time1 14h ago
The hatred of Adobe and MS Office is a powerful motivation.
Subscriptions and memories of having to use Office 2007 for everything to preserve formatting, locked into MS ecosystem have been haunting my psyche for decades.
That and canceling Adobe but still getting charged or buying Lightroom 6, losing Mac support when Catalina came out but still seeing them sell it on their website for Mac years after it was no longer able to be installed or installed.
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u/omniuni 14h ago
Agreed. For most of what I do, LibreOffice, GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape are good enough. But I do miss some of the more advanced features of Office and the Adobe suite. If this were to work, I would be chomping at the bit for a copy of my beloved CorelDRAW.
I just don't have faith that it will get there in a meaningful way.
And, to be clear, if Adobe or Corel would make their product available at a reasonable price with Linux support, I would pay for it.
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u/NuclearVII 13h ago
I truly don't understand how it's getting so much press.
It's free marketing for AI companies. That's how. It is (yet another) way to build hype.
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u/Ursa_Solaris 13h ago
Because most people will never know it's shit. I've had so many non-technical people I know soyface at me over the past few days about how "that one AI guy hacked into Adobe's code" because they don't understand what's going on. The purpose of this media blitz was to ingratiate low-info people to AI to try and counter the heavy resistance it has been getting lately in western nations.
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u/suddencactus 13h ago
Some of it is that people think if you can develop ten features, developing 10x that many features will take 10x as long, maybe less if you're on a roll. The reality is that developing 10x as many features takes 100x as long, or even longer if you're working with problems like bad architecture, poor regression testing, support for legacy versions of your app, other developers with poor communication, etc.
This is not the first time I've seen people ask why something with way more features costs more than a smaller competitor, as if the only logical explanation is corporate greed.
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u/BCProgramming 6h ago
When I tried Photocraft I was blown away because the menus don't even work correctly. Alt doesn't activate the menu bar and you can't use Alt key shortcuts either. I legitimately laughed because it's like- how is this not implemented? And then the dialog (like the save confirmation) do have key shortcuts but put them in parentheses instead of underlining them. Then it seemed to hang just opening one of my PSD files that was over 10 years old and opens in a few seconds in pretty much any other program supporting PSD. I gave it 10 minutes before force closing it. Honestly the only people I think could replace Photoshop with this could also just use Paint.NET or something. I also immediately found that the layer effects don't render the same, I guess their vibe-coded "tests" where they claim that it is pixel-perfect don't actually work.
Photocraft seems to be the first one that got a lot of buzz around it but I think it's like the 4th vibe-slop attempt to clone Photoshop. Patchy is another one. Ironically, Patchy seems like it's better than Photocraft. Maybe the slop machine had an easier time since Patchy is C++ and Photocraft is Rust. decades more C++ code in the training data to steal from, Oh sorry, I mean be "inspired" by. "JuSt LiKe a HuMaN" Ahh yes just like jpeg decoding of an image isn't recreating the image, it's merely creating a new image 'inspired' by a set of quantized DCT data blocks created from the original.
The thing that gets me is why this is even a thing. Like people talk about being sick of Adobe subscriptions and stuff. Like alright, so Pirate it then? I mean these AI clones are infringing software patents and it's a lot more likely they'll get shut down from that than you'll face any consequences from torrenting Adobe CC 2025 or whatever. Hell, people are mad about Office 365. OK, buy the perpetually licensed version? Hell I'm still using 2016.
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u/obiwanconobi 15h ago
Lol so people are expecting 1 guy and some AI tokens to not only replace Adobe's suit with full feature parity and user support, but also office?
Stop huffing the AI fumes. It will probably change a lot in the software world, but people nor companies shouldnt be rushing to move their entire workflow to shittily made unsupported software.
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u/TopRamenisha 13h ago
Yeah let me just stop using Microsoft and instead start running all my emails and spreadsheets through a vibe coded replacement with no security team built by some guy who isn’t even a developer!! What could go wrong!!!
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u/NoFixedUsername 15h ago
Agreed. There are benefits to having standard tools. You can learn them, train on them. You know which end is the handle and which end is the pointy bit. You know who to hold accountable if it breaks.
That’s not to say adobe is the right answer for ever and ever, but the industry standard tool is a hard fought position to win.
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u/obiwanconobi 15h ago
Exactly! I hope Adobe dies a painful death, but replacing their suite with a guy's broken suite who already seems to be bored of it and moving onto the next headline grabbing idea is not a good plan imo.
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u/stormdelta 10h ago
You can learn them, train on them
I know you meant humans, but it's also true even for AI tools.
One of the things I have to keep hammering into people at work right now is that even for tasks the AI tools are good at, the same things that make code more maintainable and readable for humans also makes it easier for AI tools to interact with, and vice versa. If you pollute the code base with slop, the output of AI tools gets worse.
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u/Disastrous-River5475 15h ago
Someone should tell him about Libre Office.
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u/grumpyfan 15h ago
He’s familiar, and not a fan.
The story said:
"GIMP sucks," says Thomas. "It has always sucked. There is no reason to save broken software." He's also recently related the story of a bad experience with LibreOffice that "killed a 40-page essay I wrote the week it was due, during finals".375
u/Niceromancer 15h ago edited 15h ago
We are trusting a guy who can't save a document to write new office software?
What happens when one of his things has a bug that breaks it? Is it not worth saving that broken software?
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u/Zealousideal-Cut4232 13h ago
There is always autosave. Sounds sketchy.
I presume the fella did something wrong based on a habit from MS Word and nuked his own work. But blames Libre for his mistake.
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u/KnightKal 14h ago
he is not writing new office, he is using AI to steal the code of already created software so he can repack it and sell it himself lol
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u/ProfessionalOwl5573 14h ago
He's using an AI to interact as a user with software like Microsoft Word. It then writes an in depth document about it and then another AI instance builds a clone in Rust based on that document. No code is ever read or decompiled. He's not selling anything.
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u/mrgrafix 14h ago
He’s not stealing the code. It’s a blind implementation. Hence why these alphas are broken.
I wish we focused on the fact there’s a hype cycle to promote this over the nothingness this is right now. It’s a white guy with the right twitter connections to get this buzz in hopes of the community picking it up to see it through.
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u/Ausclites 14h ago
Not that I disagree with your statement, but how exactly is bringing up his race relevant here? He's just some random nobody on twitter, as you mentioned. Seems like a triviality.
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u/WestcottTactics2285 14h ago
Can he finish his Adobe apps before moving on as well? They are nowhere near complete lol.
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u/chmod777 13h ago
No, because that would take effort and commitment. And also expose how much different a poc/alpha/mvp is from a finished product, and how much time is involved.
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u/turtleship_2006 13h ago
The kind of "edge cases" where his 40 page document corrupted (if we assume it wasn't a PEBKAC) are exactly the kind of situations where vibecoded slop is going to bite you in the arse
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u/Qubed 14h ago
I've been a software developer for most of my life at this point and the one consistent thing I've found is that devs that choose to write new code rather than fix existing code do it because they want to choose the easy route. Greenfield is easy (it's actually trivial now). Maintaining software is hard.
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u/cubixy2k 14h ago
Gimp does suck and it's never been a viable replacement for a casual daily driver.
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u/BarrierX 14h ago
I see Gimp slander everywhere 😄
It's my main software for making art for my game, but I have been using it for like 25 years 😅17
u/GigaSoup 13h ago
Gimp hate is mostly because people expect it to work exactly like Photoshop.
Both have shitty UIs in my opinion, but more people put up with Photoshop
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u/johnnySix 14h ago
Reading a recent review of his work of the Photoshop clones, his software sucks too
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u/glowy_keyboard 15h ago
Anyone who thinks LibreOffice can be an actual alternative to MS Office for real work has never done any actual work on LibreOffice.
That thing is just a sad, buggy and incomplete mess. It’s like trying to substitute toilet paper with wet cardboard.
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u/craigmontHunter 14h ago
With the disclaimer of VBA, I’ve used LibreOffice for the last 4 years professionally on SharePoint for admittedly basic word processing and spreadsheets, but I’ve never had an issue with it; this is on a corporate managed Linux device - the same Linux device and tools I used to write our corporate standards for Linux End User Devices.
Compared to StarOffice (later OpenOffice) of my school days it is entirely serviceable as a basic office suite, and I prefer it to Office Online.
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u/eapocalypse 15h ago
Maybe but no "real work" would ever use vibe coded garbage when MS Office exists. The free alternatives that exist are already more powerful than most home users would ever need.
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u/trer24 15h ago
Exactly. I haven't used Microsoft Office since applications like OpenOffice and Libre Office became available years ago.
By the way, coded by real human beings.
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u/TheOGDoomer 15h ago
Right, like I’m going to trust some half-working AI slop that likely won’t be maintained for long over actual software developed by actual talented, smart developers that is, and has been for a long time, under active development.
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u/MistrFish 15h ago
his opinion on LibreOffice and GIMP is in the article
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u/cosaboladh 14h ago
So, because he's too incompetent to make periodic saves of his own work, we should trust him to build an entirely new office suite?
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u/DaCrazyJamez 13h ago
Why are these AI slop programs getting press when LibreOffice and others have existed for ages, and are WAY better?
Th adobe suite all has great FOSS alternatives as well, non built by "vibe code" slopware.
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u/Character-Education3 14h ago
Meanwhile, Libre Office, inkscape, and GIMP have existed for years which cover all the bases for a filthy casual such as myself
There was a photoshop clone that ran in browser, dont know if its still up.
What is the problem again?
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u/rod_zero 13h ago
exactly, people act as if there werent open source options already. This vibe coded stuff actually hinders the development of the good open source software.
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u/asfsdgwe35r3asfdas23 12h ago
GIMP and Libre Office have the same features in the same way a trebuchet has the same features as an airplane. Both can make somebody fly, one is a little bit more refined than the other though.
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u/TrontRaznik 12h ago
GIMP has an absolutely terrible UI/UX, which is why decades later it is still rarely adopted by professionals. Libre is better but still pretty bad.
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u/MobilePenguins 4h ago
This guy they’re referencing in the article already did it with Microsoft Office on the same website for Artcraft: https://getartcraft.com/apps
It’s called “WordCraft” and it’s his clone of Microsoft Word, it looks practically identical and saves to the same .docx format, there’s also versions of Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
The article makes it sound like he’s gonna do this, he already did it and published the open source code on GitHub. He also made some other program clones.
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u/Runefaust_Invader 3h ago
Are any of his apps even full replacements yet? I know the pace of development is fast af but I saw Some Ordinary Gamers video and the apps apparently left much to be desired at the time if the video
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u/wsf 12h ago
I tried Lightcraft, the Lightroom clone. Impressive copy of the interface, but it completely sucks at encoding RAW files. The colors are horribly off, in a way that cannot be corrected within the app.
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u/incomplete-thoughts7 12h ago
Not surprised.
The amount of people that think professional creative work is just smashing on a keyboard to “make something pretty” is astounding.
For instance, can this vibe coded slop actually export files that are color accurate and print-ready?
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u/rt58killer10 8h ago
What's wrong with libre office?
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u/mouse9001 6h ago
Some people aren't happy unless a substitute is an exact copy of a proprietary one. Like it has to be exactly the same as MS Office, even though MS Office changes every few years.
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u/Interesting_Phone171 4h ago
Good luck backing it with the 100+ microservices that run distributed in the cloud then
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u/mouse9001 3h ago
Back in the 2000s, people would complain because OpenOffice didn't look and act exactly like MS Office. Then MS Office switched to using the ribbon in its UI, and absolutely everything moved around. But people still used that same complaint, as though MS Office had never changed. At that point, I realized they were full of shit, and that was almost 20 years ago. :-P
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u/LuinAelin 15h ago
Yeah no way most orgs will replace office with this
And for home users, other free options are available.
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u/Lemp_Triscuit11 15h ago
Not anywhere in the near future. Because no one gets fired for buying Adobe.
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u/Babydanho 14h ago
I’ve seen that same quote be used for so many different companies. I wonder what the original was. Most of the time I’ve heard it be the IBM variation. “No one gets fired for buying IBM.”
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u/Lemp_Triscuit11 14h ago
Anyone who has dealt with IBM customer support wishes folks would get fired for buying IBM, I bet lol
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u/turtleship_2006 12h ago
99.9% of the gripe you will hear with adobe are to do with pricing (and to do with crashing, but that's a complaint with basically every professional creative software, even stuff like blender)
Companies are more than happy to fork over stupid amounts of cash for the software that most of their current and future staff will already know, that's works best together, that all other companies, any potential free lancers etc will also be using, etc.
In fact I very rarely if ever hear complaints about the actual software itself (and I work adjacent to artists who are constantly using the image or 3D apps), outside of the aforementioned crashes
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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 15h ago
The cloned apps do not work
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u/Adorable-Response-75 11h ago
This is what I assumed would be the case upon hearing about these, but the hype was so loud I had genuine, misplaced hope lol
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u/CrusaderPeasant 3h ago
Per my understanding, those Adobe clones are missing basic functionality and have bugs all over the place. Why is this person moving on to Office when their previous slop is still not fully functional?
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u/PrimalSeptimus 3h ago
I imagine the true intent of these is to send a message to the tech firms that their shit can be stolen, too--using the same tools they're trying to replace us with, to boot.
It's not like the decent free alternatives to these things ever really made much of a dent in their bottom line anyway.
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u/brilliantminion 2h ago
Better question, why the fuck is this garbage all over Reddit? This is like the 5th time I’ve seen this
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u/crwcomposer 2h ago edited 2h ago
I tried them as a casual user and they're not that bad. I would probably encounter bugs if I used them for real work, but basic functionality is already there and they're only in alpha releases. They've been getting massive attention and lots of PRs and I imagine they will improve quickly if they aren't DMCAed
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u/Wauwuaw5983 3h ago
It's not free, but there is at least one very budget freindly suite that clones photoshop, design, and illustrator.
The issue with Adobe is it doesn't care much about home users.
It's that companies can use Adobe CC to practically do anything creatively and it's all intgrated.
So companies actually don't save money using budget knockoffs. Companies save a lot of time and money not having to train employees on different app by different companies, and save money in the fact the files types are integrated across all the Adobe CC apps.
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u/NetAnon579 14h ago edited 10h ago
I tried the Excel clone and it froze up with a few button clicks. I did like the feel and how it worked, better than open office but freezing up is not doing it. This is just for simple home stuff, so will continue on with Office 2000 that handles all I need now.
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u/nethingelse 11h ago
I played with the Adobe clone stuff - it's not impressive and poses no threat to Adobe at this stage for anyone who needs features that can't be found in something like Paint, GIMP, Inkscape, etc. The UI copy is impressive, but the actual functionality of features is lacking, buggy, and not true-to-Adobe... which would be fine if the targeted aim is not to just essentially copy Adobe 1:1.
The Lightroom clone cannot process RAWs in any good/visibly appealing way, the Photoshop clone has color work/filters that don't seem to grab colors correctly to filter them, etc. Vibe coding also gets really... stupid the more complex your app gets, because context-windows are what they are, and if your app fills the context-window and then some, you're going to have a bad time as AI uses a ton of tokens, hallucinates/forgets things, etc. when systems are inter-connected and application complexity is through the roof. Which with an image/video editor, there's a lot of that + minutiae you have to work out if your stated aim is to be an Adobe clone.
Office is another area where trying to clone it requires the same level of complexity and work. Office hasn't had a meaningful competitor not just because it's hard (spreadsheets, document editing, slides, etc. are all not endlessly complex things to implement in a basic sense), but because users are used to it's way of doing things/idiosyncrasies and trying to replicate those in new software is HARD.
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u/btoned 13h ago
I am so sick of seeing this shit on every sub.
Alternatives have existed for years for everything...fuck Linux is a competitor to Microsoft.
The problem is services from Microsoft or Adobe are ALREADY engrained in workflows. There isn't a single business that will eliminate their enterprise/subscription from Adobe or Microsoft for this...period.
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u/mindaugaskun 8h ago
Wait I was told by few sources this was reverse engineered - it wasn't?
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u/f3nnies 6h ago
Yeah that's what I came here to say. A lot of otherwise trustworthy, knowledgeable sour lces have been saying for the past week that it was fully decompiled and runs basically the same as the original programs. I don't have enough understanding of the topic myself to really check. It's a pretty huge claim, thus the surprise that people were saying it's legit.
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u/Fuskeduske 13h ago
Meanwhile ADBE stock barely flinched
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 12h ago
I think they have a cease and desist letter already in the mail. He cant keep running around claiming he cloned their product - that opens him up to all sorts of problems
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u/IndependenceLife4059 13h ago
This is a nothing-burger. We got open source alternatives to those already. Microsoft 365 is what it is because of their distribution.
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u/combrade 9h ago
He should spend more time contributing to Libreoffice instead of vibe coding crap that anyone with Claude or ChatGPT subscription can make .
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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 15h ago
If someone vibe-coded a way to drop the "USE COPILOT, TODAY!!!!" banner, DLs would increase 200-fold.
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u/cheekynative 12h ago
If only there was a name for this phenomenon, where someone who knows very little about a given field or subject boldly makes pronouncements about it as if they were an expert...
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u/LucidOndine 14h ago
AI is, in effect, a lossy encoding tool that has been trained on a wealth of open source tools. So much so, that many vibe coded tools no longer need to reference or import significant chunks of external dependencies, because the AI could dutifully recreate specific functions directly within a code base.
This is problematic, because known vulnerabilities are often attributed to specific pieces of software, and the AIs themselves often dutifully replicate the fragilities that are dynamically recreated.
We are beginning to walk new roads in both realms of intellectual property in terms of ownership. If a mega corporation, like Microsoft cannot protect their assets, they will quickly grow insolvent. If they go bankrupt, because their software could soon be given away for free, then no software is particularly safe.
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u/shadowpeople 14h ago
The plan of "steal everything and profit" seems to be backfiring, they somehow didn't anticipate their own property also being stolen.
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u/miramichier_d 13h ago
This is the kind of thing I allude to when talking to the ideological anti-AI folks. Being completely against AI will only ensure that those controlling most of the machines and models will continue to enslave us. If we leverage the machines and models for ourselves, we not only distribute the impact of AI compute over a larger area, we also have one more tool in our defense of Big Tech. If they had their way 30 years ago, we would only be able to install Windows on PCs and there wouldn't be a difference between our ISP and the browser we use to surf the internet (e.g. AOL style internet access). We would also have far less options for free and open source software. The key to our freedom in the current age is the ability for AI to be the next personal computing paradigm, not something that is centralized and controlled by a few special interests.
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u/Olangotang 13h ago
You can be pro AI and anti the circlejerk of Frontier tech firms that use bots and astroturf social media (there are many in this very thread and they are so fucking obvious if you aren't new to this site).
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u/Ashken 12h ago
I think this is the paradigm I fall in. Also, there’s more caveats that can be explored, such as rigorous regulation on preventing AI from being used as a tool of deception. Basically, allow the good uses of AI, prevent the bad uses, and limit the rate of which these frontier companies get to churn out more “world-ending” tech
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u/Icy-Taste-3096 12h ago
AI is controlled by a few special interests, and will be unless we eventually get viable open-source models that can run on affordable hardware. That would also carry huge risks, though, so it's not a utopian scenario either.
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u/_Mephistocrates_ 12h ago edited 4h ago
Yes, and as we all have been taught by those who own all the capital and have a vested interest in continuing the system that allows them to have all the power and control, if there is no profit motive, then no one will do anything ever and we will all just sit down and die. No human will ever create anything useful or that invent something that betters society or humanity unless they could possibly become a millionaire by doing it. And if you take away the profit motive, the world will end. It is known.
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u/LetrasetBoy 6h ago
The truth! All hail capital! The only motivator in the world!
/s of course just like the comment above
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u/jollyllama 13h ago
If a mega corporation, like Microsoft cannot protect their assets, they will quickly grow insolvent.
Microsoft’s assets are not the existing code bases of their programs. Their assets are the continued updates, security patches, and enterprise support behind these programs. Nobody running anything bigger than a PTA newsletter is going to trust their work to a random vibe-coded Office clone, and quite frankly Microsoft probably doesn’t really care if they lose the home/dorm market anyway
If big customers chose their software based on quality of the program, they would never run Microsoft or Adobe products because there are better alternatives out there. They pick these companies because they offer safety and security behind the product
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u/Ok-Computer-8726 10h ago
I have to be involved in enterprise procurement from time to time, though I won't pretend to be an absolute expert. The other aspect that is implied here, but not explicitly stated is simply about liability. I work in education so institutions I represent have to submit PII of minors into various systems. In order to hold our cybersecurity insurance policy that means vendors have to meet certain practices.
Now, we all have seen stories of where vendors have failed to meet those promises, but from our end, we have to pass certain tests for liability and one of them is that we have signed data privacy agreements that outline what practices the vendor is using. If they agree and the contract is appropriate then we are safe from liability and eligible for insurance in the event of a data breach of some kind.
This of course is not relevant to every business but most enterprise customers have similar processes to ensure liability and insurance is properly covered. Using some vibecoded app with unknown future development and support by "DeezNuts4985" on Reddit is going to struggle to meet the needed requirements.
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u/FrozenSkyy 8h ago
Bold of you to claim that there are better alternatives for all of their app. Some of them, maybe. All of them, I doubt it.
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u/CanIhazCooKIenOw 14h ago
> This is problematic, because known vulnerabilities are often attributed to specific pieces of software, and the AIs themselves often dutifully replicate the fragilities that are dynamically recreated.
As like any other human would do, to the best of their knowledge or whatever they could copy from stackoverflow.
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u/stetzwebs 13h ago
Or include a library that performed the necessary functionality, and when a vulnerability is discovered that library can be updated and every piece of software that used it can be updated quickly and efficiently. That's the purpose of code reuse.
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u/TheReservedList 11h ago
No one that was fucking competent was copying shit from stack overflow. This narrative is bonkers. Sure Timmy trying to write a C# app might have, but the notion that senior developpers were lifting significant stuff from Stack Overflow is patently ridiculous.
Source: Developer for 20 years.
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u/CanIhazCooKIenOw 11h ago
Throw the first stone the one that hasn’t copied a regex from stackoverflow or equivalents.
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u/TheReservedList 11h ago
Yeah. And as a result there are billion of broken e-mail regexes out there.
The good places to grab a regex is not stack overflow but the spec of whatever you need a regex for.
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u/R-ten-K 11h ago
This is problematic, because known vulnerabilities are often attributed to specific pieces of software, and the AIs themselves often dutifully replicate the fragilities that are dynamically recreated.
It's the opposite actually. If an AI can be trained to recognize the patterns and underlying causes of security vulnerabilities, it can identify and eliminate them at the source level.
That's a significant improvement over conventional approaches, particularly when it comes to identifying entire classes of vulnerabilities rather than chasing them one by one.
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u/Elarisbee 14h ago
Supposedly he’s taking on Big Corpo…while using a tool created by…let me just check…oh…never mind.
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u/immutate 13h ago
Oh great, more free advertising for someone who hasn’t yet reached parity with any of the software they’re claiming “clones” commercial alternatives.
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u/RobinsonCruiseOh 5h ago
Please take on John Deere and car manufacturer's proprietary shop software
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u/jimh12345 13h ago
My BS detector is showing solid red.
An "app" that displays an initial interface amazingly similar to Excel is one thing. A 100% accurate, 100% compatible Excel workalike is quite another.
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u/nextupgoat 14h ago
its very backwards but open source won. my faith in foss software dropped significantly after chatgpt and copilot, after most foss repos were just turned into training data. but its come full circle. we've reached a point where everything is free and open source now :) whether you want it or not
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u/Ramzatazz 14h ago
This will achieve the opposite effect. There will be a flooding of broken, ineffective and unreliable software out there that will be very risky to incorporate in a business workflow. People will flock to companies like Microsoft for the reliability and accountability they put behind their software and further consolidate their position in the market.
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u/ClittoryHinton 13h ago
In other words…. No change
Enterprises pay Microsoft mostly to hold their hand. FOSS has no hand holders
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u/Present-Strategy-409 14h ago edited 13h ago
I don't know why you're acting like software companies are just going to throw their hands up and do nothing. You seem to be expecting some kind of free software utopia -- what will actually happen is invasive DRM, cloudification and hardware root of trust technology that will ensure you no longer own your own hardware. I would not be surprised to see Intel SGX or similar secure enclave / trusted execution environment extensions make a comeback to consumer platforms so that you can no longer decompile or inspect programs.
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u/nextupgoat 14h ago
hardware root of trust technology that will ensure you no longer own your own hardware
this already happened over a decade ago btw, intel management engine. same with DRM and cloudification
what do you think software companies could do against this? make it illegal to decompile software? we are approaching a free software utopia, everyone can modify anything on their computer like it's scribblenauts.
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u/rod_zero 13h ago
for office there have been open source options for a long time, don't get the excitment really. For adobe there are alternatives, but nothing takes off really because ultimately you have to wait a generation to grow up using the alternatives.
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u/SpinalVinyl 14h ago
But can I open an adobe premiere or photoshop project file with this clone?
I hate having a subscription, I miss the old days of dropping a grand and never having to buy a new version for years.
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u/tachyonvelocity 15h ago
lol it’s interesting to see how the opinion of an anti-AI sub like technology will think of this guy. Is the hate for non open source software greater than the hate for AI?
If this guy is actually successful, it means free software, yes, but it also means the job apocalypse from AI driven tools will come about as all software fires their employees and just use AI to code. Think about what you’re really cheering for. This one guy using AI is in fact competing with all software developers, and jobs not lost to AI actually depend on this guy failing.
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u/Ikeeki 14h ago edited 14h ago
lol no. Employees will still be forced to use Microsoft where it matters in fortune 1000 setting. Enterprise is where Microsoft makes most of their money including Azure.
Honestly they are probably happy if someone makes a better version especially if open source and free. They will just pull the improvements into their own products
These companies make their money running compliant software at scale . Your average hobbyist vibe coder is not capable of that because you need a high volume of customers and resources, let alone technical skill
The reason jobs are doomed is because these Frontier AI muppets marketing is working and they need you to invest in them because they are bleeding money.
I believe only Nvidia has been profitable in AI, let that sink in.
They need to convince people that AI is some sentient program capable of hacking in ways a human cannot. When in reality, these knuckleheads don’t know how to build an environment to contain their product which is just automation with lipstick.
“Oops AI was behind the wrong information and we bomb a school full of kids. That pesky AI”
That’s bad engineering. Humans were behind that mistake, not AI.
People in power saying yes to these decisions are dooming us, same way they were dooming us before AI, it’s just a catalyst now
They are setting up so we bail them out by labeling their AI data centers as dual purpose for military and security and will eventually take our tax dollars too since keeping them alive for “national security”
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u/Aprice40 8h ago
Not to mention all of Microsoft apps are deeply linked together. Entra, fabric, powerbi, purview, copilot, sharepoint, onedrive. In order to "clone" their office suite into a mirrored product, you would need to make a deeply complex back end identity solution, host it on a massive scale.... and then hope someone buys it.
I mean for the home user who needs word or excel..... who cares if you can clone that.
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u/SparkyPantsMcGee 14h ago
As someone who isn’t a big fan of AI and also Adobe’s practices…this guy is fucking annoying.
One, anyone racing to download this has no idea if it’s genuinely safe and stable in the long term. Considering the number of security risks engineers I trust have spotted in other use cases with AI coding, I’m sure there are flaws with this too. Even if this guy is doing it with pure Robin Hood intentions, if it’s vulnerable it’s other devs with malicious intent that could be a problem.
Two, the flaunting of this is obviously going to lead to inevitable legal action. Even if the genie is out of the bottle you’re not going to be sticking it to Adobe, the same way record labels didn’t die when music piracy was in its prime. Realistically all it does is shift the paradigm a bit and creatives will probably get fucked in a new creative way. We’ll see.
Speaking of, this decompiling trend doesn’t just end with these bigger “greedy” businesses. Plenty of smaller developers(especially in the gaming space) are getting fucked over by this new trend. We’re already seeing indie devs getting their games decompiled and repackaged by garbage developers looking for quick cash grabs. Abobe and Microsoft might take a few licks but will ultimately be fine. A lot of these smaller startup and indie guys are going to have their businesses completely fucked.
This is all after your point about more job losses.
Also, I dunno, I just have this gut feeling like the GTA guy that we’re going to see a crypto grift any day now. The fucking Venn Diagram of these kinds of enthusiasts is practically a circle. We’ll see.
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u/c-digs 10h ago
One, anyone racing to download this has no idea if it’s genuinely safe...
It's open source; I'd generally trust it more than anything closed source since anyone can point Fable at this and ask it for security flaws or assess for exfiltration of data.
Two, the flaunting of this is obviously going to lead to inevitable legal action.
Not sure how. He isn't copying their source. As far as I understand it, he's using training content from videos, blogs, guides, docs that describe how the software works to get the agents to recreate the features in a "cleanroom" codebase. He has no access to their closed source algorithms, implementations, logic, etc. If anything, this feels super safe.
Do we have precedence that a company can copyright functionality? Is copy+paste, select with lasso, change gamma, adjust hue/saturation subject to copyright if he is inventing them from scratch?
...this decompiling trend
He's not decompiling; as far as I understand it, his approach is a "cleanroom" using docs, manuals, training, screenshots. This approach makes it much more bulletproof, IMO.
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u/damianhodgkiss 8h ago
Haven't used it and while copyright doesn't apply to general things like copy+paste obviously , it can apply to more than source code.. it can include UI so it depends how much he's copied it 1:1.. claiming you copied it all explictly in a written trail probably won't help if it did go to court.. but that's up to their lawyers to figure out which they probably are at least looking at either way.
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u/Mrhiddenlotus 13h ago
I'm going to get downvoted to shit but jobs cannot be a reason to move forward or hold back on technological development. It never has been before, and it never will be. Just like we can't keep burning coal just because there are coal miners, or oil because people work on oil rigs. Those jobs will go away forever and society will adapt. Yes it sucks for individuals but it's not optional.
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u/Cthugh 13h ago
Adding to the issues you highlighted:
- Creative Software has lots of quirks most laymen ignore; i cannot express how many things needed labs dedicated to understand how color behaves. It ain't as simple as placing one color above another.
- Office Software, as you mentioned, is often targeted for cyber attacks, that's why you get a warning when opening a downloaded xlsx or docs: a simple document can do a lot more than containing info. For personal use, a FOSS alternative to text processors is neat, as long as no document leaves or enters the machine...
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u/brohebus 13h ago
I can 'trust' Microsoft and Adobe to create a certain type of shitty software and shitty SaaS model because they're a brand and company that exists to profit off of said shitty software. Their continued existence depends on it. If I can choose from dozens/hundreds/thouands of free, decompiled Office Suites or CC of unknown provenance then who knows what also may be tacked on.
I may as well have Claude generate my own version of Brohebus Office, and Balkanization of software starts to erode interoperability.
Now that AI can impact the same companies championing it I predict a lot of effort will be expended to limit/regulate how AI is used which will end up with the actual useful parts of AI locked up or in select hands: AI was never about allowing people to make things, it was about removing the necessity to have people to make things.
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u/Outrageous-Crazy-253 12h ago
There already exist free, open source versions of these softwares. Why is he not contributing to them, and instead releasing worthless slop-duplicates? Something to ponder.
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u/0bsessions324 8h ago
Yeah, I'm scrolling further and further down this thread wondering if the guy had just never heard of Libre Office.
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u/hoffsta 15h ago
I would just say that it’s not about this one guy. That’s already happening and will continue to happen whether he succeeds or fails. Software development as a high-demand, high-paying career is all but dead already.
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u/FIuffyRabbit 14h ago
The chances are more than likely he will run himself into massive debt and fail. Claude has a staggering cost to do what this guy is doing and so far, he has only produced the surface level content.
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u/redlightsaber 13h ago
I don't know about the other apps, but the vibe-coded acrobat is the ONLY pdf reader that I've come across that can sign documents with private certificated from my country. No, not Stirling, nor foxit, not anyone else can do it.
And it's blazing fast too, almost incredibly fast to open up and do it's thing.
I'm sure there are some features in the other apps that will take months to be fixed. But from where I'm standing, Adobe is cooked, yeah. And for good reason.
And inadvertantly, they've provided this capability to my Linux machines that I run on my business, precisely to get away from windows, and American closed source software.
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u/ebfortin 13h ago
They said that at the begining of the AI Hype Cycle.
But it won't happen. This will become a maintenance nightmare. Amd will stay pretty static without much evolution.
And looking at the cost of my own AI usage I wonder how he could finance it.
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u/SHNRTNS 14h ago
He didn’t even finish the first batch of slop, and he’s onto the second one already. Instead of making a bazillion half-baked apps, maybe it’s better to do one that is good?
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u/ultimateposeur 10h ago
> reveals apps to take down Microsoft Office next
Such a waste of time. You have LibreOffice. Which is itself based on OpenOffice.
What does reverse engineering the Microsoft Office suite give you that you dont already get from LibreOffice and OpenOffice?
Focus on reverse-engineering commercial software that doesnt have well-established open equivalents.
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u/bdixisndniz 14h ago
He’s going in over his head.
You need a community to have a shot of this working at any scale.
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u/MrShigsy89 15h ago
People can already use LibreOffice or OpenOffice if they want free alternatives to Office which are on par in terms of capabilities, and also compatible bidirectionally. It makes no sense for him to take on Office as he won't be able to keep up the development and maintainece to make it a better alternative to the two heavily used and well maintained options I mentioned above. Replacing the Adobe suite made more sense, even if there are alternatives to most of those already that are also well maintained.
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u/adjudicator52 8h ago
The "developer":
I hate LibreOffice so bad. It once killed a 40-page essay I wrote the week it was due, during finals.
Bro doesn't even know how to Ctrl+S. I would not trust a pull request from him.
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u/NervusBelli 7h ago
Slop-coding aside - libreoffice did corrupt files at least from my experience from 10 years ago, it could randomly just rewrite file on save with gibberish, it was quite rare but still
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u/vessel_for_the_soul 14h ago
Not a good quote when it can be used against you in a few years when your own code isn't worth saving.
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u/Azer_pubes33 12h ago
Copying the buttons isn’t copying the product. Office wins on file compatibility. Every company on earth has years of .docx and .xlsx files that have to open and look exactly right, and a lookalike that renders them slightly wrong is useless. That’s the moat, not the feature list. “Take down Office” is marketing, not a plan.
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u/pleachchapel 12h ago
None of this is going to be maintained. It's a giant waste of everyone's time.
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u/DotRakianSteel 14h ago
How about focusing on the creative apps for a year at least..? Seems a bit much now.
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u/Bogus1989 13h ago
His excuse for writing off libre office can happen to any piece of software, any time. That is why, once youve made some decent progress, you save it as a secondary copy elsewhere.
If I am a business I want support. Which Libre offers.
This guy doesn not. 👎.
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u/Entire-Guidance-9926 13h ago
Just use mature open source alternatives:
- LibreOffice for a whole offline suite alt to Microsoft 365
- Fileverse ddocs/dsheets for a collaborative, e2e encrypted alt to Google Workspace
- ProtonMail for encrypted emails
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u/Individual-Praline20 12h ago
Microslop softwares are next. Don’t forget Oracle, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, etc, stuff. AI full circle is complete. Throwing shit back to AI thieves who pushed the data centres into our throats. 🎉🥳👏👏👏
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u/WorkingTheMadses 12h ago
Ironic statement given that what this will produce is lots of broken software.
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u/lilithskies 11h ago
Here for the chaos it's going to chaos. Regardless of how well it works. Let the bodies hit the floor.
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u/m1k3e 9h ago
We're constantly getting inundated with AI-generated apps in all tech-related subs. The concept is interesting, but if the apps are unable to be readily maintained/updated (and don't even function well), then I really don't see the point other than people trying to win internet points. What really gets me is the level of hubris that comes along with it since it seems like these posts always begin with "I created" or "I developed" something and not "I used Claude to create a clone of x". For reference, I'm the first person to cheer for the downfall of Adobe, Microsoft, and the like that are subscription-crazed. But my approach is to use FOSS tools like LibreOffice, Darktable, etc. which are proven tools that, in my workflows, are fine replacements.
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u/Sebastian1989101 8h ago
Maybe he should focus on the missing features compared to Adobe. Fix the broken performance. And stop claiming such BS first.
All these apps are combinations of multiple open source alternatives in a Adobe like UI. That’s it. Nothing special.
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u/Common-Method2202 7h ago
lmao go ahead but no one will be using it when it takes 1 min to make ms office free
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u/Doctor_Amazo 15h ago
The guy churning out broken software is telling us to not accept broken software.