The End/Beginning of Software

A single developer, vibe-coding with Claude, is recreating the whole Adobe suite of photo and video editing tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, etc.). It’s as ambitious as it is nuts – but only a few months later, he has some apps that (somewhat) work. It aims to be a faithful recreation of the original software, written from scratch in Rust and in a full clean room (i.e., no code is being copied from the original, making this legally mostly fine). If – and it’s a big if – this works, it has huge implications for the future of software: On one hand, it’s amazing that you can point an LLM at an app and get a rough clone; on the other hand, it raises the question of who will pay for software innovation. Adobe won’t be amused.