Is software over?

Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being “bit by the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.” Development of the totally free options offered here under MIT/Apache licenses will be funded, Thomas wrote, by selling token-based access to the pre-existing Artcraft visual AI model and IDE, which is offered as an imagery-generation option inside the apps alongside third-party models. This revenue stream will help ensure these apps aren’t “going to be some orphaned small-team project,” Thomas wrote. “We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded.”

Thomas is the latest in a long line of coders using AI tools to speed up the long-standing but labor-intensive practice of reverse engineering (i.e., replicating the functionality of a piece of software without directly copying the code itself). While that practice has generally been found legally acceptable, the ArtCraft apps could still face legal trouble if their “trade dress” too closely mimics Adobe’s familiar appearance and interface.

After coding exclusively with AI tools since February, Thomas said he foresees a near future when everyday developers can re-create open source versions of popular paid software to “take back the internet and own tech forever.”

“Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you,” Thomas wrote. “We’ll replace Google Search, we’ll build our own smartphones, we’ll build better infra. We’ll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.”

“Software is over,” he gloated in an earlier comment, claiming to have “one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing.”