> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
That is just an insult. With AI we are working more than ever, either because of "you should be faster now" or because half the people are getting layed-off ...
We write code faster. It's not getting merged faster because we usually find something janky.
Decisions aren't made faster.
Understanding doesn't come faster.
Code doesn't have value. A well working system has value, the bottleneck is now between having code and having a working system, rather than producing the code.
With AI you can write a new Harry Potter novel in under an hour. But if I ask you about the story you can only answer “It involves wizards”.
In pre-AI era you could solve a bug in one week. But you would end up having a detailed mental picture of the system, which requires time to be created. That mental investment helps you make better decisions on the system or solve related problems instantly.
Agreed. The recent Epic Games story (mass layoffs followed by the remaining staff being forced to use AI to crunch) is more in line with reality as I see it. I've been told by management to 'use AI' when I really need to hire.
Who are "we"? We have less (almost none) issues on Sentry, better measured performance, reduced server costs. At the end AI is just writing the same bytecode so you're not going to suddenly see software that didn't exist before.
It's an alpha phase. Why you people consider a project that is being actively developed for only couple of weeks a finished product? It's improving on a daily basis. Adobe and Microsoft had several decades. You're asking for the same in order of weeks? And for free? Is it me who is unreasonable here?
The point is you can't throw a product on the market and claim it's a replacement for everything else, with all the associated press around it. Because that's not what it is. The person prescribing what to do has absolutely no idea what all the end users actually want and need out of a product.
What it really shows is ego, arrogance and disdain for the users while running an AI cargo cult.
Everyone loves to hate Adobe because someone else does, but their products are actually pretty damn good.
And that is because they've had 30 years of effort thrown into them. It's not the big picture that's the issue, it's the thousands of small things. Stuff hidden in the menus that millions of people use. The corpus of educational material out there to help you get stuff done. And the flexibility which is really difficult to match. A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
Dude, have you seen Acrobat Reader "lately" - let's say, in the past 20 years or so? It's an unnecessary bloated and complicated product, nowadays slow as hell, and of course, the minute you open a PDF it starts with a compulsory "AI assistant" popup, whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately corporate IT doesn't care - they are not using it. On my own systems I've long switched to alternatives.
They are good only if you never seen anything else. I don't know a single image editor worse than Photoshop. Adobe Acrobat and the associated format is a blight on human civilization that needed invention of fricking arificial mind to untangle. Illustrator had idiotic bugs that surely costed millions in misprints.
And remeber Flash? The software that Adobe bought and murdered becuse of their software development inaptitude? If it didn't end up in their hands it would be part of web standards by now and all of the human creativity that this software spawned wouldn't end up smashed into smitherines.
Adobe is cancer of user facing software. Always has been.
Adobe is a company that firmly squats in few very large niches of human activity and despite its mediocrity and awefulness starves any other software that dares to venture into them. It should have been broken by anti-monopoly laws 3 times by now.
I don't know how somebody can look at how much and in what manner they are charging their customers with cancelation fees and such and think that it's an evidence of providing great value and not that's it's a sign of clearly patgological grasp on the market that they have.
I will never forgive them killing Fireworks and Flash and developing Acrobat, Photoshop and Illustrator the way they did.
I haven't touched any of their stuff since content aware resize. I'm sure that they learned to polish their turds, because it's 2020's, everyone did. I'll be celebrating their ride down as more and more people start banging out simple tools with AI agents to make the edits they need instead of digging through tons of documentation and "educational" materials to find the one almost correct option at the bottom of nested menus of Adobe crapware.
> A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
> LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
Do you know that an agent can build a simple Rust app for you that's going to be small, blazing fast and will implement for you the best 3 algorithm for that, straight from their respective papers and give you knobs for adjusting every parameter they have with any manner of precision?
All of them are listed as either "in development" or "early alpha", and every single person that has tried to do something even roughly resembling a task you would do with the original product can tell you that it's broken in a thousand ways.
As it stands right now, it proofs little more than it can replicate the post-boot screen of the original products.
Just because every tech news outlet was dumb enough to report it without trying it doesn't mean you have to join the echo chamber.
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There are definitely examples out there that do use a similar relentlessly agentic development style that have produced great results. e.g. xberg[0] (formerly kreuzberg), is a great document content extractor, and in a relatively short amount of time has become one of the most robust and performant. I've reported about a dozen edge cases of documents of various types that were unextractable, and the maintainer (or their agents) were able to add a fix in maximum a day turnaround every time.
What is that alternative? How will they maintain and keep updates going, how will they add more features, how will they support non-technical customers, how will they offer cloud that a lot of customers are used to?
All of them cost money. They are ripping off Adobe to create the new Adobe.
The worst thing is that there are genuine legit open source projects that already offered an alternative but they did not need AI or ripping off Adobe as a marketing gimmick.
Vibecoded should not be an endorsement in 2026, it should be a warning.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
Writing code is not the bottleneck anymore, making decisions is. Making the right decisions needs context and thinking. A coffee break might actually help productivity. Driving a Ferrari full speed in a crowded city - only because you can - doesn't make the outcome better.
I agree with you, but I'd say that writing code hasn't been the bottleneck in a lot of industries for quite some time.
Even in the 90s, the internet and the web dramatically lowered the costs of distribution, and YC itself was built on top of that (ViaWeb).
Then there has been so many frameworks, libraries, tools, services and APIs to pick and choose from that most of the coding work has been about organization, selling an idea and doing a lot of testing. Which are still unsolved problems.
The only new idea here is the idea that Software Developers are disposable.
This was brought by the same people who did RTO and layoffs post-covid, but now with support of non-tech workers who want a piece of that (supposedly) sweet money.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.
I would like to see some of this software improvement in the form of fewer bugs. If anything it's adding more bugs.
I'll give an example from a game I like called ARC Raiders. For the first ~9 months they did not fix any of the bugs in the main menu. The damn main menu! The first thing you see when you load the game! They also failed to fix, in that time, the bug where simply pressing the Xbox button on the controller would break in-game voice chat.
They only just solved that, as of a few days ago. The main menu bugs still exist.
Dealing with third-party overlays (I presume that's the main menu bug you're talking about) is one of the most annoying things in game development due to how it hooks into the rendering pipeline and not an easy fix.
Yeah, the Photocraft (or whatever that photoshop clone name is, naming everything *craft just blends the names together in my head) program, for example, is way too slow in WASM to be usable, I think it ran on a single thread without using Worker and basic optimization features like that.
Just because you can throw tens of thousands of dollars at frontier LLMs doesn't mean what they write would be good, you still need to have some oversight for their work.
expecting it to work well in wasm seems a bit too high of a bar.
It works relatively well in native mode as a standalone app (tho not being an actual photoshop expert, i dont know if the features compete properly, i simply hear that those trying it are impressed).
The excel clone works well enough for me to do taxes on, even tho the look and feel is a bit janky. I would stick with google sheets, but it's a usable replacement if i didnt already have sheets.
Sure, but we weren't really seeing that at all. At least, not to that scale or degree at that speed right?
I'm seeing people vibe-code inference engines for custom hardware/models too. Are they good? That remains to be seen, but I didn't used to see this at all.
It does feel like something has changed to me lately. I expect it's only going to accelerate, and the quality only going to increase.
If the photocraft suite had been manually written in 2022, with the exact same source code as it has right now, they would be the poster open-source project that people would point to for the power of an open-source community over proprietary software and be praised for the high standards of the source code.
The problem with that is that it implicitly assumes things will progress in the way we're used to.
AI written software doing the exact thing it was supposed to but breaking apart on any further improvements or changes matches what I've seen from AI generated output. The code is often bloated and fragile.
Maybe in 2 years the only jobs devs can get anymore is working for Frontier Labs to build training data / RL environments to improve performance on this task. Who knows? In the limit it seems like a solvable problem...
AI is a search engine. A good one, better than what was before that. (Which is not saying much, because the search landscape is severely distorted. For example, searching dispropotionately dominates browsing.) It can speed up searching and exploration. This is the natural limit of possible gains.
I built myself a full walkabe 3D plan of my house for my renovation project over the weekend, complete with path tracing renderer, different drawing styles, furniture arrangements and accurate models of different windows styles that I consider ordering, all based on actual blueprints and materials. I looked for usable software for that before but everything was either commercial garbage that wanted you to pony up a lot of money beforehand or hard to use manually. With AI I can build stuff like that over a weekend and I can tell it to place stuff and design things in text and using photos and 3D scans, it takes care of actual implementation. That's much better than spending days or weeks with locked down software trying to make it do what I want.
So maybe the big revolution is that we won't have "big software" that tries to cater to all kinds of users but "small software" that is tailored perfectly to the needs of a single user.
I personally made a bunch of net new, really good software that I use myself and that is much better than alternatives. You will not see that software though, because:
1. Marketing (and distribution) of said software is a chore, and doesn't really give me any benefits
2. It's tailored to me rather than to average Joe.
Almost all of the trending repos on GitHub are _about_ AI: zillion of harnesses and similar AI orchestration tools. So most of the extra efficiency gained by AI usage seems to be spent on building more AI tools and not software for end users or libraries for AIs and humans to build such software.
Coding is only one part of software. There is resourcing, financing, research, planning, design, development, testing, distribution, training and support.
The software I create for myself has improved a lot.
I also see a lot of improvements in current software and games and fast iterations. But nothing new that is revolutionary.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of more and better features in existing products.
After reading these two points, I had to scroll down to see if it was the opening of some elaborate joke, because I'm seeing more bugs, worse performance, and less and worse features.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
This might be the biggest factor in my opinion. Corporate incentives usually don't reward someone delivering 2x-10x, so an employee who suddenly found a way to multiply their productivity might be keeping that method to themselves and freeing up some time instead.
I think a lot of us are trying really hard here to avoid the simplest and most obvious answer, which is that AI coding software is helpful, but doesn't deliver the kind of productivity gains boosters are talking about.
There's a bunch of reasons for this, but the obvious one to me is just that I haven't seen any backed up claims that actually break down how a 10x (or similar) speed up would get delivered in practice.
For the sake of an example, let's imagine an engineer who works an 8 hour day split up like this:
- 2 hours: investigating and debugging potential issues
- 1 hour: reviewing code
- 2 hours: in various team meetings, catch ups or otherwise
- 1 hour: designing (including at a level of writing code for prototyping etc)
- 2 hours: actually writing code
I think that's a semi-reasonable day breakdown. Realistically, I think AI helps debug faster, and generate code faster. Possibly design work too, but I think this isn't really the case since AI workflows necessitate a lot more design work in order to make the AI generation deterministic.
So looking at that day, if I was able to fully automate writing code and debugging issues so that it took 0 time at all (which I think is a very optimistic assessment of the actual speed ups AI provides), we're looking at a 2x speed up of an engineers productivity.
If we think AI makes those things twice as fast (so 2 hours, instead of 4) the engineer is now at a 1.25x speed up. That's great, but it's hardly revolutionary. It'll change your output something like the way going from a team of 4 to a team of 5 might do.
This is obviously complete conjecture and I'm sure the average time engineers spend on things is different, but I think there's an obvious take away. If you want to make claims about the performance impact of code, you need to know where the code spends its time, and what impact you're making on those sections of code.
Similarly, if you want to know what performance gains are being made, you need to know what engineers spend their time doing and what impact AI is having of those tasks.
I've seen very little attempt to actually make realistic claims on that basis, and a lot of vibes-based "wooah, AI makes me so much faster" type claims. Those claims are obviously not nothing, but I wouldn't trust people's gut reactions to make serious claims about the overall productivity changes in our entire industry.
Yeah that's so true! I thought that as I was writing, but figured it proved my point more that even with a really charitable interpretation, it's hard to make he case for a 10x speed up at a high level.
The "We're making more software instead of making software better" and "Most people don't adopt new software very often" points hits home.
But more importantly, why should the market accept your software? Since plenty of people are "making more software" cause they are trying to "make software better" while creating similar product with the use of AI, its difficult for the market to choose which software actually solves their problem.
On the other hand, many don't accept or adopt new software as they don't see the problem they are facing, or they don't mind the problem itself. So why bother adopting new software that isn't going to pluck the problem by the roots all together with its' use?
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
I am yet to see the advancements in AI manifest in more leisure-time. It is simply that the amount of work we're expected to be able to pump out has increased, and the actual programming work is no longer what slows us down.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.
Anecdotally, completely disagree. Maybe this is nostalgia, but I perceive a distinct and massive drop in software quality over the past few years.
Worst offenders for me are the poster children for LLM-based development. I run into bugs and performance issues with both Claude and Codex literally every day. I don't think I'm an outlier here, either.
There are so many stupid little bugs in software these days that should be straightforward to fix, but just aren't fixed. Visual quirks and rendering issues. Notification bells that don't clear properly. Formatting problems. And vibecoded apps like Claude Code themselves are the biggest perpetrators.
- more bugs becoming visible that were hidden within the software we use daily
- more bugs (in absolute terms) as more people create more software in a very short amount of time (regardless of their professional training)
- less bugs in existing software as the developers and dev orgs of existing projects is capable of automating bug hunting, test case creation, ... in essence: They get a multiplying effect out of AI regarding their capabilities.
In short: Actual developers with actual experience (the more, the merrier) can do better work while the barrier to enter "the market" for untrained individuals is a lot lower resulting in a huge amount of new software whose "success" is to be determined.
> - less bugs in existing software as the developers and dev orgs of existing projects is capable of automating bug hunting, test case creation, ... in essence: They get a multiplying effect out of AI regarding their capabilities.
I'm not convinced there are more than a handful of orgs in the world who are disciplined enough to achieve this. Or organisationally willing to increase their QA Eng headcount sufficiently to achieve it.
To add some related evidence to that, I browsed this report[1] for other reasons the other day, but it stood out to me that _100%_ of Forbes Global 2000 tech leaders said "their organization has experienced some form of AI-related downtime".
Dev being reckless with LLMs are going to ship faster than the one using it responsibly to improve quality, so it would make sense to first see a drop in quality before things improve.
AI firm code are likely a different category though.
In my experience, SaaS products almost all exist to externalise something that folks were doing in-house before. Its rare that a SaaS springs up to do something truly new
I'd have preferred 1 good answer to 9 speculative and poorly thought out answers.
I think AI is reshaping the industry but it's still far from the promised benefits. But the Silicon Valley hype machine isn't happy with "reshaping" because that's not enough to attract trillions. It needs to be "redefining the meaning of being a human" and garbage like that.
The reason we're not seeing a lot of good software is because the current AI tech can't (yet?) deliver that by itself as advertised.
There's more of the stuff that's well known and understood. Any software with an ecosystem of integrations and connectors added a lot of connectors lately. CRMs, CMS and similar extended their functionality.
What we've seen very little of is fundamentally new ideas, usage paradigms, user experiences or similar.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, but the "we" is very limited. Most people don't adopt new software very often, so it's not surprising that they aren't finding new great software now.
This is just plain wrong. I don't think the people asking for new software are in any way averse to adopting new software. I for one am actively waiting for new software to be released so I can adopt it, the Rad debugger for example. The first Linux beta-builds have been shipped and I can't wait for it to be in a more usable state.
I try new software all the time, not to mention I usually try the same software multiple times before reaching a final verdict. In the text-editor space I've been around Vim, Neovim, Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, Zed, Vs Code, Helix, Kakuone, all of them several times over before settling on Neovim.
I would love for more actual CAD-alternatives, more Photoshop alternatives, more video editors (shoutout to Blick) that all cover some niche. They don't even need to be full replacements!
But no. AI has not helped on this front in the slightest. If anything the bleeding edge (if you wish to call vibe-coded, half-assed clones that) is in its most broken state ever.
"Good" is the, pardon the Claudism, load-bearing part of that question. There's a ton more software out there, but haters are just going to call it slop and not very good. So people stopped sharing their software. We're all scratching our own itch, making software for one, and then not announcing it to the world. Maybe a ShowHN that gets auto-killed.
I vibe coded an ebook reader in Swift for iOS in an evening. I wanted something that stored my books and reads in a private s3 bucket, and gave me a simple interface for reading them. It syncs my books and reads across my devices. It only has the features I want, and I read in it every day.
If I posted it you would call it slop.
I made a cute little ESP32 flight radar for my desk. Two, actually, one for my wife. It shows the planes that fly over my house and has a little web interface I can use to set my position and a few other settings. It runs 24/7 and brings my joy to look at.
If I posted it you would call it slop.
I'm designing my first synthesizer / groovebox. It has 36 hall-effect keys and buttons, 7 rotary encoders, a beautiful monochrome blue OLED, audio and midi in and out, stereo microphones, SD sample streaming, and an audio engine that scales across multiple ESP32-S3 modules. I started the firmware by hand but quickly realized I could get everything I needed much faster with gentle prodding at Claude.
I've been working on it since January and have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. I'm finishing up rev 2 of the PCB and I hope to one day sell a few.
When I post it, you will call it slop.
People are learning to keep their projects to themselves, because the Internet is full of assholes. Look at the comments already on this post. A large group of people have decided that AI does not work, whether it works or not.
Here's my simple theory.
Increasing the level of quality is not rewarded and often actively discouraged.
Almost all software is stuck at the "barely tolerable minimum level of quality".
The quality level remains constant (or goes down) regardless of any productivity gain.
Any and all productivity gain is spent for expanding scope, chasing more features, etc...
Volume of work is increased so that the development team is perpetually understaffed.
I have never once seen a team that had what you could remotely call a healthy or appropriate level of staffing. It has always been "the absolute minimum we can possibly get away with and never more". This leaves zero room for any kind of maintenance or quality improvement. Every day is a fight just to keep the lights on. I have seen people queitly sneaking-in maintenance work because that was the only way it could be done.
Thanks to AI, I was able to finish my bookkeeping and accounting app I had been working on years ago. https://financica.app
It’s not just “vibe coded”, it’s really damn good. Because thanks to AI, whenever I spot an issue, a quality of life increase etc I can just immediately implement it rather than have it seat in a perpetually growing backlog of “maybe one day”.
And there’s SO MANY standards to comply with especially in Europe and I just … implemented all of them. It’s more full featured than any of its competitors.
It runs the bookkeeping and accounting for all of my own companies plus plenty of customers. And the funny thing is for me, this is pretty much a side project. I just have people helping on sales, but all the development is me.
It doesn't really matter if we are making better software now, in the end, we know it will be better. Think of it like this: you have a very sick patient, and you prescribe a drug/protocol known to make them worse before they get better. So the intermediate step is not informative in any meaningful sense.
Human coders usually ask this question in a malicious way to imply that this technology doesn't just have to be faster than humans (which it is), it also has to produce better code (which it usually does) as cohesive product (so fixing features or refactoring in projects/products do not count) in record time (this is the trap because these models are not even a year old in their current advanced format). It's hopeless.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
If the leadership (C-suite) is afraid to take the full responsibility over AI output, then the only rational choice for developers is to "pace the frontier" themselves.
I think this has to do with human bandwidth. We are required to read and reason about all generated code, but there is limit how much can each person process in a day.
If there are skills, design MCPs, automatic testing and evaluation, feature bug monitoring, security monitoring, crash handling and automatic fixes, then we could see the productivity in teams. But now it is still our responsibility and not responsibility of the system.
AI coding is great but the distribution channels have been closed for a while. App stores are effectively closed for new apps and old internet is dead.
I don't buy that. We see nothing.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
That is just an insult. With AI we are working more than ever, either because of "you should be faster now" or because half the people are getting layed-off ...
I have no clue where the author is working but...
We've lost 75% of the team over the last year.
We write code faster. It's not getting merged faster because we usually find something janky.
Decisions aren't made faster.
Understanding doesn't come faster.
Code doesn't have value. A well working system has value, the bottleneck is now between having code and having a working system, rather than producing the code.
> Understanding doesn't come faster.
With AI you can write a new Harry Potter novel in under an hour. But if I ask you about the story you can only answer “It involves wizards”.
In pre-AI era you could solve a bug in one week. But you would end up having a detailed mental picture of the system, which requires time to be created. That mental investment helps you make better decisions on the system or solve related problems instantly.
Agreed. The recent Epic Games story (mass layoffs followed by the remaining staff being forced to use AI to crunch) is more in line with reality as I see it. I've been told by management to 'use AI' when I really need to hire.
Who are "we"? We have less (almost none) issues on Sentry, better measured performance, reduced server costs. At the end AI is just writing the same bytecode so you're not going to suddenly see software that didn't exist before.
> We see nothing.
Clear your glasses. For example - https://getartcraft.com/apps Thanks to those people we may soon have great alternatives to monopolies.
Have you tried one? They are like gargling dog shit.
Adobe is cheap compared to that miserable experience.
It's an alpha phase. Why you people consider a project that is being actively developed for only couple of weeks a finished product? It's improving on a daily basis. Adobe and Microsoft had several decades. You're asking for the same in order of weeks? And for free? Is it me who is unreasonable here?
The point is you can't throw a product on the market and claim it's a replacement for everything else, with all the associated press around it. Because that's not what it is. The person prescribing what to do has absolutely no idea what all the end users actually want and need out of a product.
What it really shows is ego, arrogance and disdain for the users while running an AI cargo cult.
> They are like gargling dog shit.
Sounds exactly like every Adobe product ever. I guess they went too far on feature parity.
Everyone loves to hate Adobe because someone else does, but their products are actually pretty damn good.
And that is because they've had 30 years of effort thrown into them. It's not the big picture that's the issue, it's the thousands of small things. Stuff hidden in the menus that millions of people use. The corpus of educational material out there to help you get stuff done. And the flexibility which is really difficult to match. A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
Dude, have you seen Acrobat Reader "lately" - let's say, in the past 20 years or so? It's an unnecessary bloated and complicated product, nowadays slow as hell, and of course, the minute you open a PDF it starts with a compulsory "AI assistant" popup, whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately corporate IT doesn't care - they are not using it. On my own systems I've long switched to alternatives.
They are good only if you never seen anything else. I don't know a single image editor worse than Photoshop. Adobe Acrobat and the associated format is a blight on human civilization that needed invention of fricking arificial mind to untangle. Illustrator had idiotic bugs that surely costed millions in misprints.
And remeber Flash? The software that Adobe bought and murdered becuse of their software development inaptitude? If it didn't end up in their hands it would be part of web standards by now and all of the human creativity that this software spawned wouldn't end up smashed into smitherines.
Adobe is cancer of user facing software. Always has been.
Adobe is a company that firmly squats in few very large niches of human activity and despite its mediocrity and awefulness starves any other software that dares to venture into them. It should have been broken by anti-monopoly laws 3 times by now.
I don't know how somebody can look at how much and in what manner they are charging their customers with cancelation fees and such and think that it's an evidence of providing great value and not that's it's a sign of clearly patgological grasp on the market that they have.
I will never forgive them killing Fireworks and Flash and developing Acrobat, Photoshop and Illustrator the way they did.
I haven't touched any of their stuff since content aware resize. I'm sure that they learned to polish their turds, because it's 2020's, everyone did. I'll be celebrating their ride down as more and more people start banging out simple tools with AI agents to make the edits they need instead of digging through tons of documentation and "educational" materials to find the one almost correct option at the bottom of nested menus of Adobe crapware.
> A good example is the ability for Lightroom to pull reasonable detail out of shadows from RAW images. No other product can touch that, not DxO/affinity/Photomator/Darktable/RAWtherapy.
> LightCraft's exposure slider doesn't even work well. Blows everything out. No interpolation curve. It's just BAM!
Do you know that an agent can build a simple Rust app for you that's going to be small, blazing fast and will implement for you the best 3 algorithm for that, straight from their respective papers and give you knobs for adjusting every parameter they have with any manner of precision?
Absolute tosh, sorry.
I don't like the Creative Cloud suite that much (FWIW I prefer Affinity, A.R.T., DxO PhotoLab, CaptureOne, any real alternative).
But Adobe's apps are pretty solidly reliable, if uninspiring in places (Affinity's layer model is better for example).
All of them are listed as either "in development" or "early alpha", and every single person that has tried to do something even roughly resembling a task you would do with the original product can tell you that it's broken in a thousand ways.
As it stands right now, it proofs little more than it can replicate the post-boot screen of the original products.
Just because every tech news outlet was dumb enough to report it without trying it doesn't mean you have to join the echo chamber.
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There are definitely examples out there that do use a similar relentlessly agentic development style that have produced great results. e.g. xberg[0] (formerly kreuzberg), is a great document content extractor, and in a relatively short amount of time has become one of the most robust and performant. I've reported about a dozen edge cases of documents of various types that were unextractable, and the maintainer (or their agents) were able to add a fix in maximum a day turnaround every time.
[0]: https://github.com/xberg-io/xberg
Slop clones of Adobe's apps doesn't feel "great" to me.
Moral compass/integrity stuff. Can't explain why, it just feels like absolutely the wrong direction to be heading in.
What is that alternative? How will they maintain and keep updates going, how will they add more features, how will they support non-technical customers, how will they offer cloud that a lot of customers are used to?
All of them cost money. They are ripping off Adobe to create the new Adobe.
The worst thing is that there are genuine legit open source projects that already offered an alternative but they did not need AI or ripping off Adobe as a marketing gimmick.
Vibecoded should not be an endorsement in 2026, it should be a warning.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
Writing code is not the bottleneck anymore, making decisions is. Making the right decisions needs context and thinking. A coffee break might actually help productivity. Driving a Ferrari full speed in a crowded city - only because you can - doesn't make the outcome better.
I agree with you, but I'd say that writing code hasn't been the bottleneck in a lot of industries for quite some time.
Even in the 90s, the internet and the web dramatically lowered the costs of distribution, and YC itself was built on top of that (ViaWeb).
Then there has been so many frameworks, libraries, tools, services and APIs to pick and choose from that most of the coding work has been about organization, selling an idea and doing a lot of testing. Which are still unsolved problems.
The only new idea here is the idea that Software Developers are disposable.
This was brought by the same people who did RTO and layoffs post-covid, but now with support of non-tech workers who want a piece of that (supposedly) sweet money.
Well we're starting to see game mashups and photoshop clones. So, the effects are becoming more outwardly visible.
The question was about good software. Those photoshop clones won't even let you get basic work done.
E.g even the comments are not working properly in the PDF reader from some unnamed related suite
What? Normal people are going to edit a photo and "spin up a photoshop clone" every time. /s
https://x.com/levelsio/status/2109288526726549822
That's just the goalpost moving exponentially fast.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.
I would like to see some of this software improvement in the form of fewer bugs. If anything it's adding more bugs.
I'll give an example from a game I like called ARC Raiders. For the first ~9 months they did not fix any of the bugs in the main menu. The damn main menu! The first thing you see when you load the game! They also failed to fix, in that time, the bug where simply pressing the Xbox button on the controller would break in-game voice chat.
They only just solved that, as of a few days ago. The main menu bugs still exist.
Dealing with third-party overlays (I presume that's the main menu bug you're talking about) is one of the most annoying things in game development due to how it hooks into the rendering pipeline and not an easy fix.
None of it good by any definition of the word
Yeah, the Photocraft (or whatever that photoshop clone name is, naming everything *craft just blends the names together in my head) program, for example, is way too slow in WASM to be usable, I think it ran on a single thread without using Worker and basic optimization features like that.
Just because you can throw tens of thousands of dollars at frontier LLMs doesn't mean what they write would be good, you still need to have some oversight for their work.
expecting it to work well in wasm seems a bit too high of a bar.
It works relatively well in native mode as a standalone app (tho not being an actual photoshop expert, i dont know if the features compete properly, i simply hear that those trying it are impressed).
The excel clone works well enough for me to do taxes on, even tho the look and feel is a bit janky. I would stick with google sheets, but it's a usable replacement if i didnt already have sheets.
Sure, but we weren't really seeing that at all. At least, not to that scale or degree at that speed right?
I'm seeing people vibe-code inference engines for custom hardware/models too. Are they good? That remains to be seen, but I didn't used to see this at all.
It does feel like something has changed to me lately. I expect it's only going to accelerate, and the quality only going to increase.
If the photocraft suite had been manually written in 2022, with the exact same source code as it has right now, they would be the poster open-source project that people would point to for the power of an open-source community over proprietary software and be praised for the high standards of the source code.
Usually it starts like this.
The problem with that is that it implicitly assumes things will progress in the way we're used to.
AI written software doing the exact thing it was supposed to but breaking apart on any further improvements or changes matches what I've seen from AI generated output. The code is often bloated and fragile.
Maybe in 2 years the only jobs devs can get anymore is working for Frontier Labs to build training data / RL environments to improve performance on this task. Who knows? In the limit it seems like a solvable problem...
Some people are just hard to please. This is awesome
AI is a search engine. A good one, better than what was before that. (Which is not saying much, because the search landscape is severely distorted. For example, searching dispropotionately dominates browsing.) It can speed up searching and exploration. This is the natural limit of possible gains.
I built myself a full walkabe 3D plan of my house for my renovation project over the weekend, complete with path tracing renderer, different drawing styles, furniture arrangements and accurate models of different windows styles that I consider ordering, all based on actual blueprints and materials. I looked for usable software for that before but everything was either commercial garbage that wanted you to pony up a lot of money beforehand or hard to use manually. With AI I can build stuff like that over a weekend and I can tell it to place stuff and design things in text and using photos and 3D scans, it takes care of actual implementation. That's much better than spending days or weeks with locked down software trying to make it do what I want.
So maybe the big revolution is that we won't have "big software" that tries to cater to all kinds of users but "small software" that is tailored perfectly to the needs of a single user.
I personally made a bunch of net new, really good software that I use myself and that is much better than alternatives. You will not see that software though, because:
1. Marketing (and distribution) of said software is a chore, and doesn't really give me any benefits 2. It's tailored to me rather than to average Joe.
Almost all of the trending repos on GitHub are _about_ AI: zillion of harnesses and similar AI orchestration tools. So most of the extra efficiency gained by AI usage seems to be spent on building more AI tools and not software for end users or libraries for AIs and humans to build such software.
Coding is only one part of software. There is resourcing, financing, research, planning, design, development, testing, distribution, training and support.
Article didn't really explain where this new, good software is :D
The software I create for myself has improved a lot. I also see a lot of improvements in current software and games and fast iterations. But nothing new that is revolutionary.
This is just speculation with zero facts. Anyone can come up with those explanations; the interesting part would be to either prove or disprove them.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of more and better features in existing products.
After reading these two points, I had to scroll down to see if it was the opening of some elaborate joke, because I'm seeing more bugs, worse performance, and less and worse features.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
This might be the biggest factor in my opinion. Corporate incentives usually don't reward someone delivering 2x-10x, so an employee who suddenly found a way to multiply their productivity might be keeping that method to themselves and freeing up some time instead.
I think a lot of us are trying really hard here to avoid the simplest and most obvious answer, which is that AI coding software is helpful, but doesn't deliver the kind of productivity gains boosters are talking about.
There's a bunch of reasons for this, but the obvious one to me is just that I haven't seen any backed up claims that actually break down how a 10x (or similar) speed up would get delivered in practice.
For the sake of an example, let's imagine an engineer who works an 8 hour day split up like this:
- 2 hours: investigating and debugging potential issues
- 1 hour: reviewing code
- 2 hours: in various team meetings, catch ups or otherwise
- 1 hour: designing (including at a level of writing code for prototyping etc)
- 2 hours: actually writing code
I think that's a semi-reasonable day breakdown. Realistically, I think AI helps debug faster, and generate code faster. Possibly design work too, but I think this isn't really the case since AI workflows necessitate a lot more design work in order to make the AI generation deterministic.
So looking at that day, if I was able to fully automate writing code and debugging issues so that it took 0 time at all (which I think is a very optimistic assessment of the actual speed ups AI provides), we're looking at a 2x speed up of an engineers productivity.
If we think AI makes those things twice as fast (so 2 hours, instead of 4) the engineer is now at a 1.25x speed up. That's great, but it's hardly revolutionary. It'll change your output something like the way going from a team of 4 to a team of 5 might do.
This is obviously complete conjecture and I'm sure the average time engineers spend on things is different, but I think there's an obvious take away. If you want to make claims about the performance impact of code, you need to know where the code spends its time, and what impact you're making on those sections of code.
Similarly, if you want to know what performance gains are being made, you need to know what engineers spend their time doing and what impact AI is having of those tasks.
I've seen very little attempt to actually make realistic claims on that basis, and a lot of vibes-based "wooah, AI makes me so much faster" type claims. Those claims are obviously not nothing, but I wouldn't trust people's gut reactions to make serious claims about the overall productivity changes in our entire industry.
You've also skipped the 1 hour reviewing code becoming 2-3 hours, or even more.
Yeah that's so true! I thought that as I was writing, but figured it proved my point more that even with a really charitable interpretation, it's hard to make he case for a 10x speed up at a high level.
The "We're making more software instead of making software better" and "Most people don't adopt new software very often" points hits home.
But more importantly, why should the market accept your software? Since plenty of people are "making more software" cause they are trying to "make software better" while creating similar product with the use of AI, its difficult for the market to choose which software actually solves their problem.
On the other hand, many don't accept or adopt new software as they don't see the problem they are facing, or they don't mind the problem itself. So why bother adopting new software that isn't going to pluck the problem by the roots all together with its' use?
Because you still need human to review all the slops, which puts the cart before the horse.
You cannot make someone believe something that they choose not to believe.
Its so weird I spend every day AI coding, thinking I'm building software, and at the end of the day, strangely, nothing was built at all.
The next day the same thing happens.
Here's the part nobody tells you: I think this guy is right - AI is building nothing at all.
BUT if you want to see what people are building, visit https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/ where there is roughly 355 project announcements per day.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
I am yet to see the advancements in AI manifest in more leisure-time. It is simply that the amount of work we're expected to be able to pump out has increased, and the actual programming work is no longer what slows us down.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.
Anecdotally, completely disagree. Maybe this is nostalgia, but I perceive a distinct and massive drop in software quality over the past few years.
Worst offenders for me are the poster children for LLM-based development. I run into bugs and performance issues with both Claude and Codex literally every day. I don't think I'm an outlier here, either.
There are so many stupid little bugs in software these days that should be straightforward to fix, but just aren't fixed. Visual quirks and rendering issues. Notification bells that don't clear properly. Formatting problems. And vibecoded apps like Claude Code themselves are the biggest perpetrators.
I can see both:
- more bugs becoming visible that were hidden within the software we use daily
- more bugs (in absolute terms) as more people create more software in a very short amount of time (regardless of their professional training)
- less bugs in existing software as the developers and dev orgs of existing projects is capable of automating bug hunting, test case creation, ... in essence: They get a multiplying effect out of AI regarding their capabilities.
In short: Actual developers with actual experience (the more, the merrier) can do better work while the barrier to enter "the market" for untrained individuals is a lot lower resulting in a huge amount of new software whose "success" is to be determined.
> - less bugs in existing software as the developers and dev orgs of existing projects is capable of automating bug hunting, test case creation, ... in essence: They get a multiplying effect out of AI regarding their capabilities.
I'm not convinced there are more than a handful of orgs in the world who are disciplined enough to achieve this. Or organisationally willing to increase their QA Eng headcount sufficiently to achieve it.
To add some related evidence to that, I browsed this report[1] for other reasons the other day, but it stood out to me that _100%_ of Forbes Global 2000 tech leaders said "their organization has experienced some form of AI-related downtime".
[1] https://itbranschen.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/the-hidde...
Dev being reckless with LLMs are going to ship faster than the one using it responsibly to improve quality, so it would make sense to first see a drop in quality before things improve.
AI firm code are likely a different category though.
My suspicion is that software is saturated. Everything that people need (and a lot more that people do not need) has been built already.
I have never once worked on a SaaS product where it felt like there wasn’t an infinite universe of things to build, simplify, improve, or change.
In my experience, SaaS products almost all exist to externalise something that folks were doing in-house before. Its rare that a SaaS springs up to do something truly new
lol go visit the 5 nearest local businesses near you and see what they use to run things.
Exactly. And they are in business. Usually they also don't fail because of SW related reasons.
I'd have preferred 1 good answer to 9 speculative and poorly thought out answers.
I think AI is reshaping the industry but it's still far from the promised benefits. But the Silicon Valley hype machine isn't happy with "reshaping" because that's not enough to attract trillions. It needs to be "redefining the meaning of being a human" and garbage like that.
The reason we're not seeing a lot of good software is because the current AI tech can't (yet?) deliver that by itself as advertised.
There's more of the stuff that's well known and understood. Any software with an ecosystem of integrations and connectors added a lot of connectors lately. CRMs, CMS and similar extended their functionality.
What we've seen very little of is fundamentally new ideas, usage paradigms, user experiences or similar.
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, but the "we" is very limited. Most people don't adopt new software very often, so it's not surprising that they aren't finding new great software now.
This is just plain wrong. I don't think the people asking for new software are in any way averse to adopting new software. I for one am actively waiting for new software to be released so I can adopt it, the Rad debugger for example. The first Linux beta-builds have been shipped and I can't wait for it to be in a more usable state.
I try new software all the time, not to mention I usually try the same software multiple times before reaching a final verdict. In the text-editor space I've been around Vim, Neovim, Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, Zed, Vs Code, Helix, Kakuone, all of them several times over before settling on Neovim.
I would love for more actual CAD-alternatives, more Photoshop alternatives, more video editors (shoutout to Blick) that all cover some niche. They don't even need to be full replacements!
But no. AI has not helped on this front in the slightest. If anything the bleeding edge (if you wish to call vibe-coded, half-assed clones that) is in its most broken state ever.
It's on my computer. It has one user and it was never intended to have more. So basically answer 6 on the list.
"Good" is the, pardon the Claudism, load-bearing part of that question. There's a ton more software out there, but haters are just going to call it slop and not very good. So people stopped sharing their software. We're all scratching our own itch, making software for one, and then not announcing it to the world. Maybe a ShowHN that gets auto-killed.
> these are conjectural, candidate answers
Point Jev at them, then!
I vibe coded an ebook reader in Swift for iOS in an evening. I wanted something that stored my books and reads in a private s3 bucket, and gave me a simple interface for reading them. It syncs my books and reads across my devices. It only has the features I want, and I read in it every day.
If I posted it you would call it slop.
I made a cute little ESP32 flight radar for my desk. Two, actually, one for my wife. It shows the planes that fly over my house and has a little web interface I can use to set my position and a few other settings. It runs 24/7 and brings my joy to look at.
If I posted it you would call it slop.
I'm designing my first synthesizer / groovebox. It has 36 hall-effect keys and buttons, 7 rotary encoders, a beautiful monochrome blue OLED, audio and midi in and out, stereo microphones, SD sample streaming, and an audio engine that scales across multiple ESP32-S3 modules. I started the firmware by hand but quickly realized I could get everything I needed much faster with gentle prodding at Claude.
I've been working on it since January and have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. I'm finishing up rev 2 of the PCB and I hope to one day sell a few.
When I post it, you will call it slop.
People are learning to keep their projects to themselves, because the Internet is full of assholes. Look at the comments already on this post. A large group of people have decided that AI does not work, whether it works or not.
> AI is replacing more durable, longer-lasting software with more ephemeral forms of software or software use
What I thought all along: the fast-food era of software has come.
Here's my simple theory. Increasing the level of quality is not rewarded and often actively discouraged. Almost all software is stuck at the "barely tolerable minimum level of quality". The quality level remains constant (or goes down) regardless of any productivity gain. Any and all productivity gain is spent for expanding scope, chasing more features, etc... Volume of work is increased so that the development team is perpetually understaffed. I have never once seen a team that had what you could remotely call a healthy or appropriate level of staffing. It has always been "the absolute minimum we can possibly get away with and never more". This leaves zero room for any kind of maintenance or quality improvement. Every day is a fight just to keep the lights on. I have seen people queitly sneaking-in maintenance work because that was the only way it could be done.
Okay I’ll bite.
Thanks to AI, I was able to finish my bookkeeping and accounting app I had been working on years ago. https://financica.app
It’s not just “vibe coded”, it’s really damn good. Because thanks to AI, whenever I spot an issue, a quality of life increase etc I can just immediately implement it rather than have it seat in a perpetually growing backlog of “maybe one day”.
And there’s SO MANY standards to comply with especially in Europe and I just … implemented all of them. It’s more full featured than any of its competitors.
It runs the bookkeeping and accounting for all of my own companies plus plenty of customers. And the funny thing is for me, this is pretty much a side project. I just have people helping on sales, but all the development is me.
It doesn't really matter if we are making better software now, in the end, we know it will be better. Think of it like this: you have a very sick patient, and you prescribe a drug/protocol known to make them worse before they get better. So the intermediate step is not informative in any meaningful sense.
Human coders usually ask this question in a malicious way to imply that this technology doesn't just have to be faster than humans (which it is), it also has to produce better code (which it usually does) as cohesive product (so fixing features or refactoring in projects/products do not count) in record time (this is the trap because these models are not even a year old in their current advanced format). It's hopeless.
> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)
If the leadership (C-suite) is afraid to take the full responsibility over AI output, then the only rational choice for developers is to "pace the frontier" themselves.
I think this has to do with human bandwidth. We are required to read and reason about all generated code, but there is limit how much can each person process in a day.
If there are skills, design MCPs, automatic testing and evaluation, feature bug monitoring, security monitoring, crash handling and automatic fixes, then we could see the productivity in teams. But now it is still our responsibility and not responsibility of the system.
Move fast and don't break things.
> output, then the only rational choice for developers is to "pace the frontier" themselves.
And then the C-suite fires them and replaces with ones who are not pacing it. It must come from the high level.
AI coding is great but the distribution channels have been closed for a while. App stores are effectively closed for new apps and old internet is dead.
> Here are some answers. As usual in this style of post, these are conjectural, candidate answers, and I would give some of them little weight
..
> Again, some of these are speculative and some should be given little weight.
You can drop this right off the top of HN when the OP blatantly acknowledges that their entire post is BS.
“Oh, you can’t critique me, I said these were just speculative…”
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