lobsters score: 0 · tags: rust, vibecoding
CS student slash artist trying them out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFB79TYI-Vw ← Somebody Vibecoded every single Adobe app
score 1 · canonical
Anything touched by one of the frontier labs should automatically be public domain given how they treated all other intellectual property as if it were public domain to begin with.
score 3 · canonical
Yeah. I somewhat doubt any human has read the source code. I wonder what effect LLMs are to capitalism, when actors can reimplement things with LLMs in this manner? Adobe has pushed LLMs a lot, I guess it works the other way too. Stare in to the abyss and it stares back etc.
But interesting to see how the industry reacts to these, as someone has reverse engineered all Adobe’s products using these new tools.
score 1 · canonical
Want to bet that no leak of Adobe source code ended up in the training set? I’d be fascinated to see Adobe do an audit and see how much is just a straight translation from C to Rust of some of the actual Photoshop code.
score 2 · canonical
If they do that, will they not put Adobe at direct conflict with Anthropic? If a court rules that the resulting project is in violation of Adobe’s IP, will that not set a terrible precedent that makes LLMs unusable for software development across the board?
score 1 · canonical
If a court rules that the resulting project is in violation of Adobe’s IP, will that not set a fantastic precedent that makes LLMs unusable for software development across the board?
FTFY
score 1 · canonical
I bet this will lead into interesting court cases.
I was thinking they mean might mean something like this by the “clean room”: https://shiftmag.dev/license-laundering-and-the-death-of-clean-room-8528/
There was also AutoCAD, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word clones on GitHub.
score 1 · canonical
I’m excited about this. I can’t see a reason why this would be illegal as long as the software hasn’t leaked and been trained on. (which as far as we know it hasn’t) And even then, the precedent from books seems to be mostly fine. Labs have been mostly ordered to pay for the works they consumed, not anything else.
score 1 · canonical
I tried out their lightroom clone and my impression is that this is not a decompilation of adobe software, it’s a from scratch attempt to get AI to write a functionally similar application, but as is still has a lot of work left to go.
I can’t see how this would be legally troublesome since the only thing they are replicating is the UI layout.
score 2 · canonical
They don’t need to audit - that’s expensive. It is cheaper to cease & desist, or bury the “reimplementer” in legal fees.
score 1 · canonical
My big fear is that we’ll get laws and terms and conditions that protect the big guys, while the big guys will continue to ravage the little guys in exactly the same way.
“Of course you can’t do that to Photoshop, it’s Adobe’s IP and they’ve told you that you can’t!”
versus
“Of course Adobe can have an LLM use your GPL codebase when improving Photoshop, it’s open source and they’re not copying your code just looking at it so the GPL doesn’t infect!”
There’s still time to fight, but I’m exhausted, and the fact that a huge portion of the FOSS community is embracing the direction of travel – either by claiming my fear won’t come to be, or that it’ll be good when it does – is making it even more demotivating.
score 1 · canonical
We already have this. This is how copyright works in practice.
Company steals your code, you sue, they bury you in legal fees, you go bankrupt.
You steal company’s code, they sue, you go bankrupt.
(And I stole the above, seen it cross my fedi feed, was good, I borrowed it.)
score 1 · canonical
What you’re describing here is a general deficiency of our legal systems in general. It’s not specific to intellectual property. What I sketch is a novel problem with the laws themselves.
Both are bad. They’re not the same.
score 1 · canonical
The practical effect is pretty much the same, though. Laws always protect the big guys. Even if we make good laws, big guys will always be able to game the system.
Besides, AI companies already use the “fair use” excuse. In jurisdictions where that exists, that law you envision already exists.
score 1 · canonical
Since this is Rust I went looking for a WebAssembly build. They have one, but weirdly they expect you to download a zip file and then serve it via localhost yourself in order to try it out.
So I uploaded that zip file to my S3 bucket and now you can try it here: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/photocraft-web-0.2.0/ (loads a 27.1MB WASM file)
I’m baffled as to why they don’t offer the hosted version themselves somewhere obvious!
score 2 · canonical
This is very impressive, but it got me thinking about what makes something like Photoshop what it is. I feel like there’s a lifecycle for software, especially for commercial offerings:
- Provide something novel or simply better than existing tools to solve a real problem or create a new space
- As you grow in popularity, provide high quality support, documentation, and training to grow your userbase beyond early adopters and top professionals
- Stagnate and rest on your laurels, raking in the cash from your entrenched users (this is mostly a problem with proprietary commercial software, less so with FOSS)
Obviously, Adobe is in that third phase with things like Photoshop. You could argue they’ve been in that phase for over 20 years. Even so, there’s so much more to Photoshop than the UI and capabilities. As someone who’s spent many years as a full-time trainer for Microsoft Office using content from companies who specialize in producing training materials for popular software, I have to assume the same materials and trainers exist for Photoshop and other Adobe tools. As awful as I think Adobe and Microsoft are, there is evidence that they do listen to their professional users and fix and change things to appeal to them.
I want all software to be free and open-source. I want us all to work together to build and support everything we depend on. If we’re going to do that, we still need to provide those aspects that are often associated with big commercial offerings: responsive support, quality documentation, training materials, high visibility of what the users want and a development team ready to implement those things, etc. I believe we can have both. I don’t know if a project like PhotoCraft will play a notable role in that transition, but maybe it can. I want everyone to use Blender, Krita, LibreOffice, etc. They’re going to need a lot of help making that transition. Maybe having something that looks and feels just like Photoshop will tip the scales.
How much of the learning curve is really about how things look and where the tools are? How much of it is when you get stuck and need help?
score 1 · canonical