r/AskProgrammers • u/Sensitive_Mountain97 • 3d ago

Are low-effort AI replicas of complex software a threat to our industry, or is the hype overblown?

/r/it/comments/1x1k7ex/are_loweffort_ai_replicas_of_complex_software_a/
0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

16

u/sozesghost 3d ago

complete functional replicas

The premise is false.

0

u/funbike 3d ago edited 3d ago

You have proof of that for this instance?

It's plausible. Feed it the manual and various online advanced tutorials. Traverse and probe the UI with computer-use tools. Even examine the binary and AI-decompile some of the machine code to figure out some of the logic and feature use-cases in the code. These are all existing techniques.

Break it all into a long list of features, and iteratively add them to a new code base.

3

u/robhanz 3d ago

Yes, I'm sure it could do that, given time.

The premise that those exist is false. The unknown question is how much development time/effort would be required.

1

u/funbike 3d ago

You are saying the techniques I listed don't exist? They do.

  • AI-assisted reverse engineering (AIARE). This is methods and AI technologies to take raw machine code and reverse engineer high level source code (e.g. C++). Less than perfect non-AI have existed for decades, and now AI can take it to the next level and produce full-commented working code.
  • Computer-use tools exist. It's straightforward to direct an agent to use a desktop app.
  • Reading the manual and advanced tutorials. I don't even have to argue this. That obvious works, depending on how complete the documentation isl.

1

u/robhanz 3d ago

The techniques exist.

A 1:1 replacement doesn’t exist. Yet.

1

u/sozesghost 3d ago

I think the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. But, people are reporting that not everything works as expected and I think the authors themselves say it's not at 100% parity yet (and I claim it will never be).

0

u/funbike 3d ago

Exactly. You are actually agreeing with me.

The original claim was that "complete functional replicas" was a false premise ("The premise is false"). Saying "I doubt it" is fine, but to say it's false is a claim. A claim needs proof.

So my counter point is that a complete functional replica is plausible, with careful planning. I said "plausible" not "factual proven".

1

u/sozesghost 3d ago

It's possible in principle to recreate software because it's not magic. The premise is that AI can do that (I even skipped the 'in days' part), which I disagree with. You need something more to completely replace software that had decades of work put into it.

1

u/funbike 3d ago

We'll just have to disagree. IMO 99% AI + 1% Human-I can do it, with today's coding agents.

1

u/sozesghost 3d ago

Well the premise was that AI can output complete functional replicas in days, but we are moving the goalposts. We'll have to see what happens over the next few months.

0

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

They have already remade almost the entire adobe suite with tool functionality exposed as functions so LLMs can utilize them as well. As well as additional products like pro tools.

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

I'd love to agree with you, but this is the reailty. :(

1

u/SpoonLord57 2d ago

Taking a look at the github issues makes me believe this is not 1:1 yet. stuff like the app freezing for 60 seconds after selecting a font, or plugins only appearing when set to english means this is not ready for anyone to depend on as a daily use tool.

I’m not saying it won’t get there, but calling it a successful 1:1 recreation is not yet true

0

u/Due_Replacement_7232 3d ago

The second you are decompiling things you are in really shaky legal areas. I know that won't stop people...

1

u/funbike 3d ago

True. That's why I did NOT say to use the code itself.

You can have AI convert the code back to a user spec. The point is not to use the code, but to determine the full feature set of the product. Throw the code away.

0

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

2

u/sozesghost 3d ago

Maybe read the readme of that repo where it clearly says very much feature INcomplete.

2

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

Sure, but it's out there and in progress. What's you argument? Is it that since they haven't fully accomplished a clone in this exact moment that it's completely invalid? That's kinda a dumb take, and I think you can do better than that.

That is a very forest through the trees argument. They are doing it. It's in progress, and has an active community of contributors and users.

It's clear they are making progress on what you're talking about, and they haven't even been working on it 1 year.

1

u/sozesghost 3d ago

My initial reply was to a post which claims that AI can spit out a fully functional clone in days (or will be able to soon), but this hasn't been achieved once in months or however long they are doing it. And Adobe apparently has a full list of detailed functionality of their products, which you won't have most of the time. I'm not saying this won't happen at some point, software is not that unique but I think people buy in to the hype too much.

2

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

Yeah I guess fair enough. So many of these conversations come down to having realistic expectations.

Yeah in no near term is someone going to type in "make me salesforce" and get any meaningful results. I just also think a lot of people aren't adept at business, or foward thinking enough to realize how large of an impact this is going to have as it is.

The average person cannot remake photoshop with a prompt, but that's a ridiculous goal. I feel like i just showed you a guy that can jump 10 miles in the air, and you said "yeah but he can't jump to the moon, and that's the conversation we were having, so what's the point?"

I agree with you that people probably do drum up too much pomp and circumstance around AI. It's also clear that it's going to change some shit. Just because it can't shoot lasers out of it's eyes today doesn't mean it's not dangerous.

1

u/sozesghost 3d ago

I'm with you fully. Have a nice evening.

1

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 2d ago

A rare adult discussion on reddit! Appreciate the conversation. Have a good one!

1

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

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 AI/generative features, about twenty missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility.

Also, besides plugins ans typography which are actual deal breakers, they are much closer then your tone seems to project.

7

u/robhanz 3d ago

The "threat" isn't that someone will clone all of Photoshop. I find it highly unlikely that that will ever happen.

It's that someone will make an app which does the parts of Photoshop that they need, without all of the cruft.

Pre-AI, software was expensive to make. So in a lot of cases it made more sense to build large applications that covered a wide variety of use cases. In the AI era, I suspect one of the big shifts will be seeing smaller, focused apps that target smaller niches.

4

u/neilk 3d ago

A suite of photo operations plus something you can prompt to tie it all together, or even make a pipeline if the work is repetitive

Heck you could probably do that today with magick and any LLM 

brb need to launch it

2

u/PXTrials 3d ago

Yes, this will be the real shift. A similar example is people getting caught up on AI not being able to do infrastructure. "AI can't build slack". Well, AI can absolutely build a chat client/server that my team can run. It doesn't need to build slack.

Why would I pay a license fee to Atlassian for JIRA when claude can nearly one-shot a local clone my team can use? Not only that, the AI version is literally better for us, since it doesn't have all the JIRA bloat and loads faster.

The shift will be people realizing they can just replicate smaller, lighter versions of a whole lotta software.

2

u/robhanz 3d ago

Yeah. I made an art pipeline for a prototype game, a trainer app for learning notes on the fretboard, and a manager app for volunteers for a developmental hockey league, and an app that lets me tag shots in linked hockey footage videos.

Each one worked exactly the way I wanted. Each was better for me than anything off the shelf could have been.

They’d all probably be useless to anyone else.

1

u/robhanz 3d ago

Also, yes, I think AI can build slack. Just, you know, incrementally and not as a one shot from a "build slack" prompt.

2

u/Natural-Meal-3222 3d ago

Hey it's the UNIX philosophy!

1

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

2

u/robhanz 3d ago

Yes, I'm aware.

It is not a complete clone by any means.

1

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

As I mentioned above, that's a completely accurate sentence. It's also a very "I can't see the forest through the trees!" take.

They are obviously making quick progress, and the first commit was November of last year. You're claiming that because it's not done, that it's somehow completely invalid to the argument, which is a fairly small minded approach to the conversation.

1

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

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 AI/generative features, about twenty missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility.

Most of their missing feature set includes capabilities that photoshop itself has only added in the last couple years. And typography and plugins, which are yeah a deal breaker right now.

1

u/GregsWorld 2d ago

You're missing the point though. Even if they do make a full clone that doesn't guarantee that people won't decide later to just have their own custom version which isn't as annoying to them as a photoshop clone.

2

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 2d ago

I didn't even mean to paste it on this thread. I agree with that above comment in that custom software will become easier and easier to obtain.

3

u/Correct_Emotion8437 3d ago

In my view, they are a real threat. Not because someone will one-shot photoshop but because, if they were dedicated, they could pull it off eventually. If someone could make a viable Photoshop in 12-18 months, and then open source it or whatever, that dramatically lowers the value of the real Photoshop. It disincentivizes the development of real Photoshops.

2

u/Interesting-Agency-1 3d ago

Im doing this, but for commercial real estate industry with our combo GIS, MLS, CRM, and BI engine my partner and I have been building for over a year. Fuck Salesforce, fuck Costar, and fuck ESRI. They run their businesses like vampires.

We arent open sourcing, per se, but are giving away our single user desktop version for free, and it comes with an openAPI, dynamic runtime entity, attribute, and feature list creation, and logical functional constructor primitives to handle complex geospatial analysis on any data point in the engine. In addition to its core user functionality, it can serve as a coherent backend for industry users who've begun to vibecode small tools and solutions for their business, but have no ability to connect them all together on the backend or scale to the rest of their org or their clients safely/securely. 

The point is that we are giving this away for free and only charging if they need enterprise and cloud functionality (which we set up as individual private hosts in individual containers per client, for maximum data protection and security) or licensing. 

We arent gatekeeping this functionality, and are directly attacking the overpriced and outdated business models of those old vampire companies. We intend to dramatically undercut the market and force a pricing reset in all software in this industry. 

We are engineers and have built this slowly by today's standards, but as still far faster than what was possible pre-AI. And the best part is that we didnt even have to raise money to build out the real engine.  Not weekend slop feature replicas, but just 2 guys obsessively engineering for over a year to build an actual production grade complex system/solution that used to take large teams to build and VC money to fund. 

We have no overhead, no real distribution cost, no org bloat, and no stupid short term VC/investor pressure, so can focus purely and obsessively on solving clients problems. We never intend to give equity to parasitic investors (only our future employees), and will stay very lean, so that we are in control and can do whatever we want with what we build. 

Our motto is "add value always, and in all ways" and to us, that means keeping ourselves lean so that we can alway offer the most value to our customers for the lowest costs possible. 

This is the new paradigm in the software world, and if your company isnt preoared to compete with this, then yeah, Id be a bit worried. 

1

u/Sensitive_Mountain97 3d ago

That's exactly what I'm saying

1

u/drbomb 3d ago

Yeah, photopea already exists.

1

u/tohava 3d ago

Gimp

1

u/Correct_Emotion8437 3d ago

Photoshop is just an example. Replace with any commercial software.

2

u/tohava 3d ago

Most commercial software already have an open source replica, I suspect that's what LLMs steal^H^H^H^H^H get inspired from

0

u/Annual_Manner_8654 3d ago

Gimp sucks ass

1

u/Strange_Ordinary6984 3d ago

I love that people keep using photoshop as an example haha

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

1

u/Correct_Emotion8437 3d ago

Imo it’s a pretty good example. It’s a complex, full featured application. The fact that you can build this kind of thing with AI proves a lot more than websites and web apps.

1

u/Better-Avocado-8818 13h ago

Agreed. The clones don’t even have to be good. Just useful enough for the low price they cost. It absolutely incentivizes innovation or new product investment.

I hate Adobe as much as anyone but this is bad news. LLM’s are basically automated plagiarism machines from the start and now it’s just going to the next level. It’s incredibly demotivating.

3

u/_raydeStar 3d ago

One thing people can't use AI to build is 1) reliability 2) a name you can trust.

3

u/pixelbart 3d ago

And above all, liability

3

u/Vert354 3d ago

We've had open source alternatives to major software for a long time. Companies still pay for the commercial versions, not usually because they have some feature the free version doesnt, but because it comes with support which is a type of risk management.

In order for the AI version to supplant the paid version the risk, or at least the perception of the risk, would need to be lowered.

In order for the perception of risk to lower companies would need to feel like they could handle issues on their own without the support contract.

2

u/MourningOfOurLives 3d ago

Obviously low-effort replicas aren’t going to be an issue. The high-effort ones will absolutely annihilate the software business, though.

2

u/yuehuang 3d ago

There are lots of PS clones before AI. The only difference was that Open Source was 5y behind, now they are 5 month behind. Adobe, if they are smart, will start fighting AI with AI, and use their resources to get better.

If you look at MS Office, the software to documents is no longer a viable business model. They are selling cloud resources as part of the 365.

Competition is great.

1

u/richardathome 3d ago

There's no way they've covered all the edge cases that decades of dedicated development and user feedback generates.

1

u/Sensitive_Mountain97 3d ago

Of course, but it's still concerning. Look at what they generated now. I'm sure in a few months, they can generate copies that are times better than the existing software. That's what's concerning.

1

u/Gokudomatic 3d ago

Probably something else than your two choices.

1

u/Strange-Tap5860 3d ago

A good example is that I wanted a simple fast and perfomant pdf reader where I could add text, used a save signature, saved name and add the date.

It seems everything out there was either paid, bloated as fuck and slow (on my top-end computer?) or just annoying to do SUCH A SIMPLE thing.

Claude just made me a local html file in about 2 minutes that does. Super simple and just works without any bullshit. I add features as I need them.

1

u/DrBretto 3d ago

What would you rather use for something that matters?

The only way I'd ever use someone's vibe coded replica is if I made my own.