Very similar Adobe alternatives, the *Craft apps

[TimHughes]

Are we underestimating just how fundamentally AI is changing the economics of software development?

The interesting thing isn’t that someone can now write an app in their bedroom. It’s that the same person can potentially operate an entire software business from their bedroom.

The barriers to entry are collapsing. Software development, testing, documentation, customer support, billing, licensing and infrastructure can increasingly be automated or outsourced. What once required a company employing 20 people might increasingly be done by one or two.

And that changes the competitive landscape enormously.

I do think Adobe needs to worry about hundreds or thousands of small developers producing highly capable, specialist applications at a fraction of the traditional development cost. Those applications don’t even need to replace Photoshop. They just need to do particular jobs better or more cheaply. Collectively, they could take away a substantial part of the market.

Big software companies still have enormous advantages, especially their established ecosystems and customer bases. But I suspect they’re in for a much rougher ride than many people expect. As an aside, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein started migrating its government computers from Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice in 2024 after a long pilot project.

I think we’re witnessing a fundamental change in the software industry.

 

[Phil V]

The bottom line here is that this ‘free’ software costs the end user nothing, and appears to have very little cost to the ‘developer’.

Meanwhile the huge tech firms have invested trillions of dollars into AI, for no obvious short or mid term return.

The big question is will the bubble burst before costs come down or will we have to get honest about how much this ‘free’ AI stuff actually costs.

 

[JohnMcL7]

I do think Adobe needs to worry about hundreds or thousands of small developers producing highly capable, specialist applications at a fraction of the traditional development cost. Those applications don’t even need to replace Photoshop. They just need to do particular jobs better or more cheaply. Collectively, they could take away a substantial part of the market.

But that's been the case for years. There's been numerous open source applications that offer huge amounts of functionality for free and crucially, they do it better than these vibe coded apps do. Or look at Davinci Resolve, completely free for the standard version and fully functional yet many people pay huge amounts of video editing applications. There's been free open source and fantastic alternatives to Microsoft Office yet it's still a huge seller for Microsoft.

Even putting aside many of the issues with these vibecoded apps (which even the authors aren't aware of because they didn't write the code), there's a lot more to it than just the software being 'free'

Ironically while it is genAI Adobe need to worry about, it's not this that's the issue it's people using genAI tools to generate images and videos they want instead of Adobe tools.