If this is actually based on decompilation, they're going to get sued into oblivion. If it's a reverse engineering project based on behavioral observation... it's probably relatively thin, and the question becomes whether the maintainer(s) are going to invest enough effort into it to merit user trust. Given how massive the feature sprawl of Adobe CC is, getting from zero to something is pretty easy. Maintenance, completeness, and meriting trust are a lot harder.
The thing is - agents are fantastic for creating those behavioral observations, too. Describe in English is not a problem for a language model.
I've got 75% of Animal Crossing done the same way. I assume Nintendo will try to kill me... but I am following the rules of reverse engineering. Because it's super easy to do now.
The world is a runaway train. Who knows how it will all end.
This looks more like spam... there is no de-compilation.. an LLM based vibe-code app is no adobe alternative, and gimp is already opensourced and covers the same workflows. They are also charging for these new apps on their site. Additionally, they themselves have this disclosure:
"Important Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha, and we want to be straight about where it stands: much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. The biggest gaps are Al/generative features, about twenty missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility. Every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command (docs/parity.md), but that measures wiring, not behaviour. The honest, dimension-by- dimension picture and where we're going next are in the roadmap's parity assessment. Expect rough edges, and please file issues (include your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot). You can also tell us what broke on Discord."
I mean 1) hell yeah that's sick and 2) the front-end software isn't the moat typically, it's the cloud service with stuff like collaboration and storage, maybe even render?
I think the greater concern should be the increasing viability of spinning up your own personal version of any SaaS product, especially if you constrain it to only the parts you need. These products are made to appeal to as broad a user base as possible, and a lot of personalization is missing by default. Users don't have to sacrifice personal needs due to software scarcity anymore.
Title is factually wrong. The author describes their project as a "clean-room reimplementation"[0]. "Decompiled" in the HN title seems to be a (severe) misunderstanding.
Are we getting to the point (in a few years maybe?) where software will have its Suno moment where there is no need to actually pre-create it on some occasions.
It’s just created when required and personalised to exactly that use case. Then either reused or just discarded.
That is a weird world if so.
Or maybe we all have our own personalised version of photoshop that Adobe allow you to modify and still keep paying them.
Mostly hunger if people don't do the nasty but righteous things that need to be done to prevent us from being trapped into the system that is being built because obviously the world's power centers could easily see this coming years ago and are building the oppression systems needed to deal with the hungry masses
You might not see these systems being built in less developed countries because they are already used to just plainly shoot the hungry masses whenever they revolted. E.g. the whole banana thing
I was hoping this would happen. The administration has decided to place AI over copyright, and congress has gone along and so this is what awaits all the big companies that have a software moat.
This is what awaits all companies that have "quantity of IP" as their moat, whether it is in music, movies, software, netflix, ... Maybe it even goes so far that youtube, tiktok are vulnerable (obviously tiktok and youtube will enshittify by having movies done by AI, and at that point ... where's the difference?)
Let's see if congress' commitment lasts once AI decimates decimate the stock values of microsoft, paramount, disney, ... and what they'll do, because at that point I don't see what the good choices are for them. Because that's going to happen a lot sooner than AI firing all the software engineers.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadI've got 75% of Animal Crossing done the same way. I assume Nintendo will try to kill me... but I am following the rules of reverse engineering. Because it's super easy to do now.
The world is a runaway train. Who knows how it will all end.
> Built the hard way.
> Every Crafting App is written from scratch in Rust and held to the same rules.
"Important Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha, and we want to be straight about where it stands: much of Photoshop's feature surface exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. The biggest gaps are Al/generative features, about twenty missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility. Every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command (docs/parity.md), but that measures wiring, not behaviour. The honest, dimension-by- dimension picture and where we're going next are in the roadmap's parity assessment. Expect rough edges, and please file issues (include your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot). You can also tell us what broke on Discord."
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
[0] https://github.com/storytold
Dang it. Gotta get one week faster.
It’s just created when required and personalised to exactly that use case. Then either reused or just discarded.
That is a weird world if so.
Or maybe we all have our own personalised version of photoshop that Adobe allow you to modify and still keep paying them.
You might not see these systems being built in less developed countries because they are already used to just plainly shoot the hungry masses whenever they revolted. E.g. the whole banana thing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981449
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986072
A clean-room reverse engineered Photoshop is huge and important news.
Are we hiding from reality now?
This is what awaits all companies that have "quantity of IP" as their moat, whether it is in music, movies, software, netflix, ... Maybe it even goes so far that youtube, tiktok are vulnerable (obviously tiktok and youtube will enshittify by having movies done by AI, and at that point ... where's the difference?)
Let's see if congress' commitment lasts once AI decimates decimate the stock values of microsoft, paramount, disney, ... and what they'll do, because at that point I don't see what the good choices are for them. Because that's going to happen a lot sooner than AI firing all the software engineers.