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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing, I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for Adobe tools who are in fact only using "the most obvious subset of functionality" and would love to have a replacement that suits their needs without the hefty subscription price.

So even if these tools never reach 100% parity with Adobe, if they offer the basics, and they're free and open source, it will be a win.

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I'm sure that is true. On the other hand, the majority of their customers are likely using these tools for work and larger organizations are paying for the licenses. People in school for the fields that use these tools are probably being trained on Adobe products, with some discount for the school and the students. I don't think these vibe-coded apps are going to get much traction, there's a whole entrenched ecosystem around Adobe products.

My distaste for vibe coded apps aside, I wish them the best of luck.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, that's for sure! Adobe is down like 60% over the past 5 years (after a massive run up). So they're going to have to figure out something after the failed Figma acquisition + increasing competition from vibe-coded apps.

I think Adobe is in sort of a rock-hard-place situation, where they can't change their current apps too much because users are so invested in them, they can't build new apps without pulling resources away from their main apps and creating confusion, and they were denied the ability to just acquire their primary competitor.

Their best strategy, so far, has been to create new "mobile" versions of their apps where they can iterate faster.

Joel Spolsky has a famous post about this:

=-=-=-

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

=-=-=-

Also, there are many image editors _already_ out there of varying levels of power and ease of use. Some open source, some commercial.

And yet Photoshop still rules.

As a power user of Photoshop, I will say yes, most people use about 3-10 features that adobe offers.

But there are thousands of free tools for those people already, the point is this guy is saying he cloned the entirety of the adobe creative suite with vibe coding in a week. That's not true. He made a bunch of simple and buggy "creative suite flavored" apps. That's a completely different thing than what he claims.

And those free alternatives have existed for years

Here's the thing though, those "alternatives" don't always hit the mark. I've sure Inkscape and Affinity's vector programs do a fine job. I've been an Illustrator user since the 90's so... the shortcuts, the workflows are all burned into my brain. I truly enjoy it. If Adobe had a Linux version, I'd gladly pay the 20 bucks a month for it. But the best we've ever gotten is Affinity allowing some shortcut editing and it partially working under Wine - as long as you aren't using HiDPI.

I downloaded this on one of my Linux laptops this morning. Immediately I did some quick editing/drawing and was like, "well, this completely fits my needs for SVG editing now".

This is where I'm at. I'm not even a supporter of vibe coding and I have serious issues with overwhelming reliance on AI in software development. That said, the Illustrator alternative from this suite of apps is the best vector editor on Linux that I've ever used. I will only remain a user of this software if Affinity doesn't end up porting their app to Linux natively, like they are rumored to. Affinity's workflow is so much easier to use than the Adobe's, and I'd switch in a heartbeat from this vibe-coded suite.

I suspect the reason alternatives haven't taken away marketshare isn't because of the software itself - it's because of the industry around it treating it as the standard. That's not going to change with a vibe-coded alternative

You're free to use Gimp today. Almost zero professionals actually do.

Why would these users go for i.e., gimp? Following this logic gimp is a better choice.

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