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submitted 6 days ago by blimpkit@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

I just tried pdf craft on fdroid and really liked it, but its on beta and only 2 versions released.

Is it going to be well maintained and become an alternative or just stay unstable ai dlop? It had more stars on github than some other pdf viewers.

Whats your take on that. I am excited to see some decent apps on linux. Especially for .appimage and launching instantly unlike photoshop.

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[-] melfie@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Believing these apps will succeed is based on an assumption along the lines of LLMs being able to produce quality code at 100x the speed of a competent human engineer. Maybe they can produce slop that fast, but using LLMs in a disciplined fashion to produce a quality product usually means LLMs are only providing a modest productivity boost in my experience.

It’s not realistic that these apps are anything but slop given the timeframe and scope spanning multiple complex apps that each took a decade or more to develop.

In my 20+ years of experience as a software engineer, I’ve never seen a successful project that hastily pumped out a massive pile of buggy code and then went back and fixed all of the problems later without doing a complete rewrite. You have to build incrementally and bake in quality every step of the way. LLMs may make the process a little faster, but the same rules still apply.

A poorly built codebase will always eventually collapse under its own weight. What I anticipate is that they’ll play whack-a-mole for a while and then give up. If they were targeting a small subset of one app’s features over a timeframe of months, I might believe it, but several massive apps all at once and it will all be done weeks from now? Stop bullshitting yourselves.

[-] lautan@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Things are different now. AI can do a rewrite / refactor all night and fix whatever issues were there. Also these are offline apps, so it's not like they have to do migrations or care about uptime. I'll wait and see how things go.

[-] melfie@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

I’d sure like to see Adobe and their ilk get their comeuppance, so I won’t mind being wrong about this. We shall see.

this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2026
23 points (96.0% liked)

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