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Comment by solid_fuel | Hacker News Reader

Dreams are one thing. People here are tired of fantasies and wishful thinking. Looking at the problem here - Adobe treating customers like crap and exploiting them - most of us realize that the solution is simply regulation. Leveraging the power of society and government to force the company to behave properly.

Gesturing at LLMs and going “this and the free market will fix it” is laughably naive, especially in 2026. That is why people are reacting harshly. This is a problem that was created by the free market, it’s not magically going to be fixed by some new product.

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Better reply than I would've written.

FWIW GP, I'm not bitter. I just know what won't fix this and cosigning this comment, it's more free sodding markets and more new products.

You want companies to act user-first? Cool. Make it fuckin illegal for em to NOT do that, and watch it happen. I see no percentage in it for anyone, apart from the worst people in our industry, permitting companies to have the option to act unethically. I don't think that adds value for anyone.

I'm all for antitrust and pro-consumer regulation, but there appears to be a faster path now.

It's all stochastic hill climbing, and the gradients are changing. The new salient is using AI to tear down moats and make the grading factor how good companies are to customers.

You know what, I'll bite.

> It's all stochastic hill climbing, and the gradients are changing. The new salient is using AI to tear down moats and make the grading factor how good companies are to customers.

If we take this hyperbolic future at face value, against all the indicators of how bad and unmaintainable AI code is, especially the more it scales up, if we just ignore that and pretend for a moment that Claude can make actual, honest-to-god, functional software based on nothing but prompts: then why do any companies survive at all, apart from Anthropic? Why would you buy Photoshop, any Photoshop, irrespective of it's quality and how good Adobe can be, when you can just have Photoshop, for the cost of the Claude subscription you're already paying for?

Why does ANY software house survive? Why does ANY game developer?

> "how bad and unmaintainable AI code is"

You don't know that.

Do you know how bad and unmaintainable human genetic code is? Eh?

We called a lot of it "junk" for the longest time. Vagus nerve, etc.

You have to look at all of this with a radically different perspective. Keep your systems thinking, but reframe things.

AI code is genes.

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