The AI Photoshop clones: interface mockups that don’t work
Enterprise software is awful and the vendors treat their captive customers abominably. So the vibe coders promise they can get Claude to make a copy of your most annoying business software! Just like that! This is always a lie, as we found out earlier this year in the “SaaSpocalypse” — when…
Annons
Annons
Enterprise software is awful and the vendors treat their captive customers abominably. So the vibe coders promise they can get Claude to make a copy of your most annoying business software! Just like that! This is always a lie, as we found out earlier this year in the “SaaSpocalypse” — when enterprise software stock prices momentarily crashed on the idea that your boss could just yell at Claude Code and replace Salesforce. This was not the case! This time it’s Photoshop’s turn. Adobe is loathed by its customers. The company settled for $150 million with the US Department of Justice earlier this year over charges of abusing its customers on subscription renewals. [DoJ] So you can easily sell the idea of vibe coding Adobe into the bin. Hooray! Magic totally happens! There’s been a string of vibe Photoshop replacements over the past year. This week’s is Artcraft, who claim to have reverse-engineered the Adobe Creative Cloud! And they’re doing a massive PR campaign. The claims are huge. These are complete functional replacements! But also they’re in “early alpha” stage, so they’re “functional” as in not functional. [Futurism] Artcraft took screen shots and a list of functions and got Claude to generate code based on those. The functions exist in the app, but a lot of them don’t work. You end up with something that looks like Photoshop, and it works a bit, until you try anything beyond what Microsoft Paint does. Or maybe curves. Or editing a 10,000 by 10,000 pixel image. Or cut-and-pasting without the app hanging. Adobe might be annoying, but Photoshop does in fact work and do its job. Photoshop has been maintained for nearly 40 years. But every vibe coded promotional project swears it’ll keep up maintenance — and then it dies. Artcraft has also made vibe-coded Microsoft Office clones! For you to trust your actual work to. Like you couldn’t just download LibreOffice, which is now using “no AI” as a marketing point. [Document Foundation] Our good friend Aron Peterson has written up a short history of the vibe-code clone scam — companies that sell something that can’t work, and promise liberation with AI tokens. And they will also sell you the tokens. [Shokunin Studio] This kind of mockup software sells because users see the interface and they think that’s the software. Even if the code behind it is largely not there. Like a fake 20 terabyte hard disk with fishing weights inside. [Ars Technica] The finance markets are as gullible about vibe-coded software as they were in February. HSBC analyst Stephen Bersey downgraded Adobe stock after he read Artcraft’s PR barrage, on the notion that professionals are totally going to throw out their working tools for a vibe code mockup. [Trading View, archive] Ask your boss when he sees a mockup. If you’ve got the user interface mockup, the software is 95% done, right? You can just dash off the stuff behind that this week, right? That’s never been true. But try telling your boss that. Video — Podcast