I don't think this is going to amount to anything; the rate he's popping these out suggest he's more motivated by making a point and/or prestige than getting something useful at the end, and turning these enormous codebases nobody has any intuition for into something maintainable is going to be grueling work that will make them wish they started from scratch. But if we imagine that this will go somewhere:

Wouldn't that be bad for open source in the long run?

Businesses, certainly not the larger ones, are not going to touch this for various reasons. So while Adobe and Microsoft may take a hit, it's not going to fundamentally harm their business models. Students, on the other hand, can't afford the real thing. If that leads to them to alternatives like LibreOffice, GIMP, or Krita, then when they end up in the workforce, there's going to be at least some pressure to let them use the tools they're used to. In fact, I use LibreOffice at work. But if they can have something that looks and feels exactly like Adobe's and Microsoft's products, they'll feel right at home with the real thing at work.

As many free alternatives as there were before the rampant vibecoding, it seems that this growing collection of tools is not only functional, but a message to the large companies as well. Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cuts.

Blood in the water for Adobe. Acrobat is a steaming pile of garbage. My org worked with their engineering team to track down a bug that we reported. They affirmed the bug (app hangs on launch) and then took four to five months fixing it.

I've worked in software engineering. I know that debugging, patching, testing, verifying is difficult. But the enterprise license costs a lot and that was a very long time with a crippling bug. The only satisfactory answer (to me) is that they don't feel urgency because they are entrenched without real competition. They need to wake up.

(No, I don't think vibe-coded Acrobat replacements will unseat them. I think LLM-powered real devs will come for them because the moat is smaller.)

~~Creator~~ instructor

might be slop, but it is a solution. i know not stomping on the little indie projects like gimp is the perfect way, i know governments should follow germany and ditch microsoft, but here we are. code probably can be untangeld, and implemented to other projects as well, so the ui might feel familiar, and compatible with every format.

we all know well that most of the time a designer has to send the psd file, and i know many controllers at finance that need their macros which wont work in other excels.

None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline

Where's the legal limit?

If I use AI to make and sell a Ford truck, will Ford sue and we can get precedent that AI use is still a copyright violation?

"creator" my ass

Why doesn’t the dev rather work on specific features sets on one existing project instead of building half baked fleet of slop.

I think (from a layman's perspective) that these would have far more potential if they didn't fully commit to the "100% from scratch reimplementation in Rust, btw" bit. Especially for this Office suite, where a wealth of options already exist that they could build upon (LibreOffice, OnlyOffice/EuroOffice, Collabora Desktop) for more proven support of these formats.

That said, I hope they decide to vibe clone Clip Studio Paint someday, then there'd finally be an open-source tool that can open .clip files. And maybe that could even allow someone else to implement the format in Krita, GIMP and the like

Massive nothing burger, those sloppy clones are fucking terrible in production, and dont believe me, look it up yourself.

Id love for it to be really of substantial value as it is now though.

Situation sucks because I would use Libreoffice if the UX wasn't some dogshit pooped out by a backend FOSS guy in his sleep

Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don't think some slop apps are going to change that.

I'm a Microsoft hater but I don't think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?

Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.

FOSS clones for software just to work on closed overengineered standards is stupid. We have had markdown for decades but still prefer oblong zip-xml files for writing rich text and slides!? Absurd.

Excel is the only MS Office product that makes sense to exist, and thus carries the brand to dominance largely by itself. Docs and slides have already been solved; I wish devs just focused on making the perfect Excel clone and abandon looking at all other MSOffice programs.

It's funny, but we've had LibreOffice for years. I'll take the human made one, thanks.

But continue making the unaccountable Epstein class uncomfortable. Autodesk next, yes please. I'll still use FreeCAD but boy is it quirky lol.

I'm pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code

Great, more slop

Lots of anti-AI sentiments in here and I get that, but I'd like to discuss the implications here, cause this is actually somewhat revolutionary.

If I can just take any software and reverse-engineer it or recreate it to a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the original (not saying it really is in this case, but for the sake of discussion) and I then have copyright over that copy, doesn't that turn things on it's head? Doesn't that make software essentially worthless? Any software you sell someone, they can recreate and distribute for free, legally (presumably). I suppose we've yet to see if this will really turn out to be legal, but it's hard to argue how this is illegal, I would say - how is this different than a human closely studying Microsoft Word and "simply" writing their own version of the same program?

I'm not sure if this is good or bad honestly, but it sure is interesting. Anyone else have thoughts around how this affects the worth of software?