Adobe is Screwed. So is every other software company

[Brian The Snail]

In the end, Linux is the way to go. Sadly, I'm stuck on windows because fucking Daz Studio won't port Daz to Linux (yet).

I've got a feeling that may be on somebody's list at this point. Over at Renderhub they have all sorts of vendors writing utilities and plugins for DAZ that probably should have been in DAZ 6 to start with. I think it's only a matter of time before somebody vibe codes the whole damned thing. That ArtCraft Suite? Has a complete Linux port. Adobe never bothered either.

 

[TailsWin]

You can use Claude Code to create your own GIMP-like app, with the features you want.
Only try that if you're technical, though, know about coding. (Unless you only want something fairly basic).

I make my own apps for where what I want doesn't exist, or I want to experiment and learn something how things work. I'm a micromanager so I have to get everything exactly how I like it.

Making a bitmap graphics editor from scratch sounds like a nightmare. Yea, you can get AI to write the code, but you still need to specify how you want things to work. E.g. if you don't like Gimp - are you able to describe what exactly you don't like and how to fix it? If you gonna just tell AI to "make Gimp but more user-friendly", you end up in the same situation. Because unless you specified everything in detail, you'll just get another new program with new UI you have to learn. So at that point, why bother? Just learn to use any of the myriad of existing apps.

Indeed if you just want something simple, then sure, vibecode your own, but as features get added, complexity shoots up and choices need to be made.

That said, maybe I'll fork Gimp at some point and add some stuff that I'm missing. Or maybe I'll try to decompile XnView since that's been my sore spot for 25 years that it's not open source lol. I wonder how all this will affect small devs that make closed source apps.

 

[TailsWin]

Now this is more interesting. People are de-malware-ing their spyware-riddled smart TVs, And reviving cloud devices that are no longer "supported" (so you should buy a new one).

 

[FantasyForge]

I've got a feeling that may be on somebody's list at this point. Over at Renderhub they have all sorts of vendors writing utilities and plugins for DAZ that probably should have been in DAZ 6 to start with. I think it's only a matter of time before somebody vibe codes the whole damned thing. That ArtCraft Suite? Has a complete Linux port. Adobe never bothered either.

A cool point, Mr Snail. I reckon a determined engineer using Claude Code could achieve porting rather quickly!

 

[FantasyForge]

I make my own apps for where what I want doesn't exist, or I want to experiment and learn something how things work. I'm a micromanager so I have to get everything exactly how I like it.

Making a bitmap graphics editor from scratch sounds like a nightmare. Yea, you can get AI to write the code, but you still need to specify how you want things to work. E.g. if you don't like Gimp - are you able to describe what exactly you don't like and how to fix it? If you gonna just tell AI to "make Gimp but more user-friendly", you end up in the same situation. Because unless you specified everything in detail, you'll just get another new program with new UI you have to learn. So at that point, why bother? Just learn to use any of the myriad of existing apps.

Indeed if you just want something simple, then sure, vibecode your own, but as features get added, complexity shoots up and choices need to be made.

That said, maybe I'll fork Gimp at some point and add some stuff that I'm missing. Or maybe I'll try to decompile XnView since that's been my sore spot for 25 years that it's not open source lol. I wonder how all this will affect small devs that make closed source apps.

Claude Code is an EXCELLENT ANALYST.
You tell it ask you questions all the time, and make suggestions. You'd be amazed how good it gets at figuring out what you want, and coming up with neat solutions. A tip is to get it to create mock-ups of the UI. Claude has become excellent at figuring out what I like, too.

I would be wary of GIMP source code, though. It's a fucking mess, you can bet your life. They should rewrite it from scratch with Claude.

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

One of the supposed downsides of vibe coding is it churns out spaghetti code. It's a valid complaint, but the only reason "Spaghetti code" is bad is humans can't maintain it. When you get down to the assembler level, it's all spaghetti code, machine code is worse.

The question would be can AI maintain spaghetti code, and my bet would be the answer is yes. Which changes the whole game.

 

[TailsWin]

Claude has become excellent at figuring out what I like, too.

Idk, maybe. I've not tried CC. If I'd want to use some subscription cloud thing, I'd use something Chinese like GLM.

But anyway. The "design the UI for me" works up to a point. If you want to add some new 20 features, you're gonna need to just add more stuff, be it menu items or buttons. At some point, it'll get to a stage where:

a) you specc'd it out yourself, so you know where stuff is
b) AI put stuff where it thought is best, so you don't know where stuff is
c) AI put stuff where other similar programs put their stuff, which may not be where it makes sense for you.

Sure you can prompt AI to ask you, but regardless it's not gonna ask you where to put each of the 20 buttons.

I'm talking about the details here, not the overall concept. The first versions of Photoshop looked more like MS Paint, but the labyrinth of options that it's today is what you get by adding more details. If someone made some different decision for some detail at version 3, maybe the 'bitmap graphics suite' today would be something totally different.

I would be wary of GIMP source code, though. It's a fucking mess, you can bet your life. They should rewrite it from scratch with Claude.

Uh, why? I don't know any details, but if you want, you can just go look at their repo...

The question would be can AI maintain spaghetti code, and my bet would be the answer is yes. Which changes the whole game.

Spaghetti code is a human concept... I mean literally, spaghetti is human food lol. I find it bonkers how people blame AI for coding mistakes, when it's taught on human-written code. All the messy code, security bugs and all the mistakes from before 2 years ago are human made.

It can maintain about as well as humans can too. It's fine with a clean sheet but as stuff gets too messy, AI can get lost too, because its attention mechanisms are also trained on human data. It can't keep an entire massive repo in memory, it has to make decisions on what to focus on and how to look for what's needed.

That's one thing about AI... It would be better off if it could get to the stage where it can skip the whole 'human-readable programming language' concept and write either machine code, or some intermittent format it designed itself, with documentation format that's made for itself. But as long as its underlying tech is based on human language, it's also limited by it.

 

[TailsWin]

Ok I'll share some fun battle story snippets from my AI-assisted coding work To be clear, I'm not bashing AI here, it's just funny. These aren't even anywhere close the top models anyway.

On the other hand, experiences like this show inherent limitations of these AIs ("autoregressive transformers that generate language based on next-token prediction" if you will). Yes, you can minimise issues like this with training, and with harnesses and agentic capabilities, the model can control and check its output. But the underlying concept is still there, regardless if we're talking about 2M model, 35B (like most here) or 3T. You're getting them to generate human-readable code piece by piece, and then read it back for tweaks, based on human rules and behaviour.

Example of: "Oops I made a mistake. Eh, fuck it, maybe it'll work"




"Wait, this is supposed to be the final version?"



"What do you mean, front literally means in front of something?"