Probably not, there's relatively little secret sauce to something like Photoshop. It's just a lot of grungy work that, I guess, you can now delegate to an agent if you have enough money and time.

As an aside, I've heard a lot of hot takes about how this is the end of Adobe, but I'm pretty sure it misses the point. The main reason people pay Adobe is because it's a familiar line of stable, well-supported, interoperable, and actively-developed products. There's already plenty of cheaper or free alternatives (Davinci Resolve for video, Capture One / Darktable for raw, Affinity for photo editing and vector drawing, etc), and if Adobe survived that, I sincerely doubt they're going to lose pro customers to a vibecoded app where half the stuff is probably subtly broken or left as a TODO, and that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.

I've been really inspired by it. Ever since that sort of joking project came out, "Malus," that would clean room reimplement GPL software under more permissive licensing, I've been chewing on doing the reverse for proprietary software. I've been calling it the Manfred Macx theory of disruption, for the character in Accelerando that would patent and then release to public domain profitable ideas before a megacorp could lock them down.

I've got my wedding coming up so haven't had the time I want to dedicate seriously to finding some proprietary things to disrupt, but I've had fun using this as an opportunity to play with subagent orchestration, open weight models, various harnesses, and local models, to see what happens if I let some LLMs churn on it. That resulted in a hodge podge researched list of potential targets: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity/issues

One thing that stands out is a lot of software kinda does already have a FOSS replacement, it's just not really how people want it to be. GIMP being the representative example. Photoshop people just don't like it, I'm sure for not entirely invalid grievances. However the maintainers of these kinds of tools are often strongly opposed to LLM involved contributions, again , often for not entirely invalid reasons on these incredibly complex projects.

So the long and short of it is that as powerful as LLMs are, we aren't quite where some of the doomsayers are saying we are, insomuch as proprietary software is dead. Even with reverse engineering we aren't there. There's genuine labor, time, and expertise moats around most of these programs.

Personally I'm shifting to trying to find niche abandoned software with no export flow. Even if I can only help out a couple hundred people, it sounds like a decent use of my time.

No, we explicitly do not use reverse engineering. We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (inspired by Photoshop)

https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft (inspired by Word)

https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft (one of the more mature apps)

https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (another app close to 1:1 parity)

(etc.)

Using REA for something as high profile as what we're doing is likely to result in lawsuits. We're doing everything we can by the books.

We cannot look at Adobe sources. Use of Ghidra is disallowed.

REA is probably great for personal apps and for abandonware, but I think if you publish the results and it's found to have decompiled the original proprietary sources in discovery, you might be in for a bad time.

I built a from scratch rust RAW processing engine similar to the brains behind photoshop and lightroom - its much more powerful and its not even complete yet

yep. it is unexpectedly everywhere. like, overnight.