After coding exclusively with AI tools since February, Thomas said he foresees a near future when everyday developers can re-create open source versions of popular paid software to “take back the internet and own tech forever.”
“Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you,” Thomas wrote. “We’ll replace Google Search, we’ll build our own smartphones, we’ll build better infra. We’ll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.”
This guy is full on delulu if he think using big tech AI trained on stolen material is gonna free them from big tech enshittification. Actual free, open souced software is always there for people to looked at, majority of people doesn’t need specific function on their software, they just need a software available right away without any tweak.
If they are using paid AI they are just transferring the dynamic from the paid software companies to the paid AI companies as no one will truly understand these apps and be able to maintain them without using AI.
And that’s the AI industry endgame. A world where developers are no more and people can only get software tools or apps from them by paying insane fees.
They want this for everything, not just software. Skillsets, knowledge bases, web searching, reasoning and logic.
They flat out admitted that with statements like “we want intelligence to be a commodity that people buy from us”.
They are fascism-craving sociopaths. That’s it.
I tried the video editor and photo editor. Lot’s of missing features, but to give them credit the project isn’t even a week old from initial release. I don’t even think effects work at all in the video editor. Then, GIF support is totally broken/missing in the photo editor. But the base structure is there, but right now they’re more like simple programs dressed up as complex programs because of the amount of broken or missing feaures.
The problem with vibe coding is that progress is great at first, it can build out the basic structure of an application, a data layer, some functionality that works, etc. But as the application gets more complex, it really starts to struggle to add that complexity without it getting confused and throwing out stuff that works because it can’t get the new parts to work. Or it forgets a structure that has been implemented, and designs a whole new structure for each added part, so you end up with massive regressions, a Frankenstein’s monster of different styles and implementations, and a very inconsistent application that just feels wrong to use. And if you now need to go in to the code to improve it yourself, you’ll either hit a wall of your own ability, or you’ll spend all your time trying to fit the square peg into the round hole that the ai generated. A complex application like Photoshop will never be replaced in it’s entirety by a vibe coder, not without good engineers keeping everything in check for the long term.
