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Comment by praet | Hacker News Reader

Adobe's moat is so small, so it's a matter of time until someone frustrated with their pricing would rather just rebuild the entire Creative Suite. I have also rebuilt the features from Photoshop I want using Rust recently (primarily because the company I work for started blocking Photopea, but I digress...) and it's been a great to work with. I can imagine the same would hold true for Lightroom, Illustrator, and Indesign.

Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction

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Adobe’s problem isn’t that we replace their tools with AI created tools. It’s that we replace the use of their tools with the use of AI.

Yep. You've jumped right to the end of this story.

I think the same thing about the endless proliferation of Web-dev frameworks. Why bother? Just have AI write it in native JS or WebAssembly and be done with it.

Both actually

Adobes moat is being the industry standard, and the wealth of documentation and tutorials and features like integrating with industry standards (printers, cameras, exotic formats). I can't imagine every company going through the hassle to have people relearn their complete stack when hiring new people because the have the n-th possible "adobe replacement" software.

They might if they pay adobe $1-5 million dollars a year. I'd its open source you hire the developer onto your company and have him work on the features you need in the app in house.

That hasn't happened and will not happen.

A company paying $1-5m for software that is reliable, provides support and created by experts in the area will consider that a deal. They go through standard training -- only in case the user hasn't used the software before -- and they're ready to go. By comparison, for your imaginary in-house developer, they'll need to do development (including shit like getting third-party library approvals), support, training etc along with all the overhead. You'll need to have a manager who may know nothing about computer graphics yet need to come up with plans and roadmaps. Users will learn from scratch. It distracts the company from delivering its actual product. I very much doubt it's a one person job and it's worth it in the end.

You probably should actually talk to corporate IT to understand how things work.

Most people are going to use AI to interact with this. I think the notion that Adobe will always be the leader because of content and tutorials is wrong. Why would I watch a tutorial if I could just use MCP and ask LLM how to do something?

Your "most people" are not the target user of Adobe and likely have not purchased Adobe software. Adobe isn't even interested in them.

Especially for professionals who are paid to do their creative work.

> someone frustrated with their pricing

What about their service?

Yep. I was on a long plane trip and settled in to do a bunch of work in InDesign, only to have the POS try to re-validate my subscription at that moment, without even a one-day workaround to no Internet connection.

But then I remembered that the flight had free Internet. So I log in... only to have these morons try to TEXT my phone a 2FA code. On the plane.

After I got back I checked with our IT department and found that our Adobe licenses are paid up for TWO YEARS.

Despicable.

Same. I hate paying Creative Suite, so during few hours I vibecoded Photoshop clone for myself in rust, with only the features I am using. Have been using it for the last 9 months, no problem. Super fast start, full PSD support, layers, texts etc.

”Etc” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I’m sure it works great for you, but something simple as “layers” is for me smart objects with plugin support and Camera Raw integration.

Photoshop has a lot of bad things going for it, but it’s still the only software that does what it does, and I’ve tried all the competitors that have popped up over the years.

If you have the time those are just 1-5 hour hurdles to get over, most of that is waiting for the agent to obtain the background info and for you to test the resulting outputs.

It's not that different from having Claude go to a website and sniff all the API calls it makes as you're interacting with it and then using that info to create a website that you prefer interacting with and all the layers and interactive components that you like.

I am sure adobe has known about this, so they pivoted to web aka cloud Saas for businesses a few years ago

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