I can haz Photoshop?

Recently, someone claimed to have fed the Adobe suite into their LLM and replicated most of Photoshop in Rust. You can find the repository here. They claim they didn’t reverse engineer it, and I believe them, because if they had, Adobe would have the repo down by now. What followed was essentially an AI code-generation edition of overclaiming and underdelivering. They claimed 82% parity with Photoshop, and then, based on the bug reports (not just the number but what is in there) we can conclude two things. First, everyone wants to see Adobe hoisted by its own petard. Second, the software was nowhere near 82% parity. However, look at the pull requests. I give it another week or two before LLMs and the network effect close the gap.

I hang with a group of LLM enthusiasts on Discord. We’re not the “oh it’s all amazing” types but people who have been building with AI for two years and burning our fingers. However, something that we, Satya Nadella, and others have been saying for some time now is that software is approaching the value of $0. If I can feed specs into a frontier model and get a half-way functioning replica, then why am I going to buy something, especially now that the industry has moved to subscriptions?

I admit, I live in an echo chamber of early adopters. I started using LLMs for everything from marketing and video generation to entire codebases (including Pac-Man in 3D from Pac-Man’s perspective), long before they did any of it particularly well. I realize adoption isn’t evenly distributed. Many of you may still be using Cursor and reviewing each change or even just using autocompletion. If that’s you, you’re shaking your head, thinking I’m daft, but if you’ve been generating for a while, you’ve seen the shift from stub machine to one-shotting pull requests.