Good luck putting that genie back in the bottle! You brought this on yourself.
Does he have to be so gleeful about the idea that someone who has worked for years to create something can now have all of that work ripped off and lose their livelihood? Is that really the spirit of open source?
I think it is the beginning of the end of coders like me, though. I really ought to get on the AI train and start iterating new builds using agents rather than doing everything myself, but even then selling software is just going to get harder and harder. And I’d rather not spend my days just auditing code written by machines.
I wonder what happens when all software is generated by AI. Right now those agents have been trained on a bunch of open source code, but soon enough nearly all new open source code is going to be generated by AI, so presumably AI is going to start eating itself by being trained on the output of other AI. And when Apple (or whoever) releases new APIs, presumably they’ll have to train AI models on those new APIs to make it useful to the new generation of “vibe coders” (ugh to that term). (Apple is already releasing “skills” for Xcode that allows agents to update code with new features.)
Someone find me a loom to smash.
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You know my stance on this. There’s no such thing a “vibe coding”. You either code or you don’t. And if you don’t, you give up the only thing that “A.I.” can’t generate and that opens my wallet: Trust.
At the same time, it is hilarious when a toxic company pushing “A.I.” gets steamrolled. By “A.I.”.
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I’ve worried quite a lot not just about coders like you, but you in particular, Keith, because you’ve created this amazing writing tool and not only that, this wonderful discussion community where we can be free to speak our minds. Years of commitment and hard work (and not just by you – plenty of others, too), only to face…what? Replacement by the machines?
I think we are living through a sea change where even end users can spin up their own writing apps, or take something that is open source or has a plugin system and extend it to perfectly suit not just them, but their own writing project, as I’ve done with Obsidian.
While I’m happy as a writer to be able to roll my own writing app to suit my particular needs, I worry about those who have created brilliant apps with incredible human effort and commitment, as you’ve done. Seeing your post just now really brings it home.
Fortunately, Scrivener has such a following that it’s unlikely to be in any real jeopardy in the marketplace, though I’m sure there will be measurable erosion of market share as more competitors bring apps to the marketplace with head-spinning rapidity. Your challenge is just as you said: Do you keep coding as before or do you incorporate AI into the process just to “keep up”? And if you do incorporate AI in coding, is that what you signed up for? I hate that you have to wonder.
I wish I had the answer for you, Keith. All I can say is the community continues to love and value Scrivener and its creator. Hang in there, please.
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The “good news” is that if anyone has the resources and incentive to test the scope of current legal protections and potentially prompt expansions for software developers that are more akin, say, to the pharmaceutical industry than the literary one… it’s Adobe.
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Scrivener’s timing seems luckier and luckier. It was released at a time when a lot of software was still being sold in boxes but internet speeds were getting fast enough that “shareware” was becoming more and more popular. (We even looked at creating a boxed product in the early days.) So we hit the market just as boxed products were being phased out and download-only software was starting to become the norm, making entry to market easier.
At the same time, this was pre-App Store days, and before the term “app” was even in use - a time when the market wasn’t being flooded by new apps daily and where a decent app would get a magazine review (we had bunch in MacUser and MacWorld et al - I still have copies). So a good app could get traction and didn’t get lost among a myriad of other apps.
And we had twenty good years of that before AI looks set to disrupt things. That’s a good run! Of course, I hope we get to continue for a good while yet, but it’s difficult to know where things are going to take us.
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There is a line of cases where the “look and feel” of a thing is protectable intellectual property. I’m thinking at the moment of a case where Fudruckers sued a competitor for copying the look and feel of its restaurant. Would it be too much of a stretch to say that this new open-source project copied the look and feel of the Adobe suite and therefore violated Adobe’s rights? This theory rests on trademark and has shades of tort law.
I’m also thinking of the standard clause in many end-user agreements prohibiting reverse enginering of the software. This theory rests on contract.
I’m just scratching the surface of possible causes of action that Adobe has available.
I predict that Adobe will prevail in pretrial injunctions because I think it can establish the likelihood or success at trial, followed by a permanent injunction and damages.
While I have little simpathy for Adobe per se, I root for it nevertheless because it represents the human side of an epic battle between humans and machines.
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I saw a video recently talking about the effect on (mobile) apps. The app stores are flooded with slop. Yet the overwhelming majority of users stick to the ones they had installed pre 2022.
Again, trust at work. “No A.I.” is a seal of quality.
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I agree with you when it comes to software created by others. However, when we can now create our own individualized software apps through vibe coding, where we can inspect the code ourselves and guide the process, I’m not so sure trust is a barrier. I’m not happy about this, but I think it’s true, nonetheless.
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[quote=“November_Sierra, post:8, topic:154857”]
I saw a video recently talking about the effect on (mobile) apps. The app stores are flooded with slop.[/quote]
There was a AI clone of Scrivener for mobile on the App Store a little while ago. It wasn’t exactly a clone, but it had the same features and its description was basically a rewrite of our app description. Not only that, but it was called “Scrivener”, owing to some weird glitch in Apple’s App Store code whereby it seems that although you cannot submit an app with the same name as an existing app, you can change the name to that of an existing app in a subsequent update. So yep, it’s a real problem. Of course, it’s completely against App Store rules to copy existing apps, and violated our trademark, so Apple were very helpful in sorting it out. (Ha, not really; Apple didn’t give a toss.)
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Oh, 100%. This project is infringing on more patents than a chinese factory on a quiet sunday morning.
Can Adobe get it removed from Github? Almost certainly. Can they control the whole Internet worldwide and stop it from popping up in hundreds of other places? Absolutely not.
The users who need “vibe coding” the most are the same ones who can’t inspect the resulting code.
If a skilled programmer (or anyone, really) uses it for a hobby project to save some time, that’s not my business. Your computer, your rules.
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The first thing that came to my mind is why they did this the hard way. Would have been lot easier to clone Gimp’s repo and rebuild it to meet their needs. It already has everything Photoshop has feature wise. And what comes to Photoshop look and feel, that is already done https://photogimp.com/
And if they had been really good people, they could have contributed back to the project.
To me these people may be good at using AI, but not very smart. Instead of “work smart, not hard” they seem to prefer “work hard, not smart” strategy.
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I’m betting reengineering it was actually quite expensive in tokens, too. Fine if you’re trying to prove a point, but I wouldnt want to have to cover Adobe’s legal fees if they lose a challenge.
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It’s probably escaped no-one’s attention that a not insubstantial part of the value that keeps an app around is the available support and all that wider organisational machinery.
I’m an Adobe subscriber. I find it hard to imagine that I would switch from Adobe to a free app equivalent for the simple reason that I have entrusted it with 30 years of memories.
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Yeah, the whole exercise they went through to “produce” this sounds ridiculous to me. I do have a feeling the people behind this are just ignorant without any engineering skills or development experience and just blinded by AI.
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@piivonen It get your point, but it’s not just Photoshop uhh… craft. They also cloned “VectorCraft”, “FilmCraft”, “LightCraft”, “PdfCraft”, “EffectCraft”, “DesignCraft”. Basically everything. Seems pretty smart to “steal from scratch”, rather than meddling with a dozen existing open source projects, especially since it’s meant to fuck with Adobe.
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Here’s a more neutral article about the Adobe clones built by Artcraft with AI. From Ars Techica, with useful links.
“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones
[Preview wasn’t working]
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Most people don’t actually want to do this, though.
The early adopters of personal computers were programmers and people who wanted to be programmers, who saw PCs as opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Some of those people went on to found companies and are billionaires now. But most PC users just wanted to get stuff done and were happy to use someone else’s software to do it.
The early adopters of the web were eager self-publishers. They had ideas that they wanted to put out into the world, they saw a whole world of free knowledge opening up before them. Some of those sites are still around, but there are lots and lots of abandoned passion projects where the creator simply got bored and moved on. It turns out there are more information consumers than information publishers.
Same thing here. Vibe coding purports to lower the entry barrier so that anyone can be a programmer. You can spin up a custom application in a matter of days! It may even work! But the more you want it to do and the more reliable it needs to be, the more you’re going to run into the limitations of what LLMs can do and the more knowledge you’ll need to have (or develop). At a certain point, it becomes less like playing with a fun toy and more like work.
(Same with AI “writing,” by the way.)
And that’s in a world where tokens are still heavily subsidized by the LLM companies. You can already use Scrivener forever for less than a few months of Claude Pro. Once the price starts to reflect the actual cost?
So no, I’m not worried that LLMs will kill any form of creative work. They’re certainly creating a rough patch for creators, and certainly a ton of money is being spent to try to convince us all that they can, but they simply can’t do what their promoters claim.
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In one sense I can understand the anger focused on Adobe after they went to a subscription model. So they feel some satisfaction in messing with a company that charges about US$600 a year for a subscription. But what would be the point of messing with Scrivener which is a one time affordable purchase. To many people it makes no sense to use pirated versions of affordable software. What is the advantage?
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I agree, and I just have to add:
Anyone can feel like a programmer. That’s the ingenious part of this product. People pay real money for this feeling, and the product makes sure they remain unskilled and keep paying.
I’m not judging anyone. If one really isn’t interested in programming and this is the only realistic way to build something they want to use any time soon, by all means, yeah, go ahead, good luck. (But please don’t call it “coding”. And don’t try to sell it to me. Thanks.)
If, on the other hand, the task just looks a bit daunting… Damn, you’re cheating yourself out of so much satisfaction. (This goes for every skill, writing, sports, whatever). Once the blood, sweat and tears dry, it feels like magic. And you owned it.
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