The internet seems to be back on the “software is dead” bandwagon again. Most of this has come from a huge wave of cloned apps and recompilations of software which has been made possible due to Claude Opus 5.5 and the other frontier models.
If you keep up with tech news you have probably heard of ArtCraft which has spent the last month creating open source alternatives to the Adobe suite and the Microsoft Office suite of apps. These are marked as early alpha, which basically means they are full of bugs and not ready for production use yet.
Even though there are bugs they are being rapidly developed and for some use cases they are definitely usable and at a price that everyone likes, free!
The argument is that anyone can now vibe code a clone of your application and therefore software is dead. Everyone will just create their own personal applications for tasks and that no one will pay for software any more.
Is that really the case though?
There is a reason why the Adobe suite and Office apps have been targeted and that is because of their unfair pricing model. High monthly fees combined with a cancellation fee in Adobe's case, make the case for building a clone economically viable.
If you only wanted to use Photoshop for example, the cheapest that you can get it is around $20/month (excluding any temporary discounts).
Most people don't use the majority of features, and therefore it almost makes sense to vibe code something useful and save yourself $240/year. If you plan on using it for multiple years no matter what it cost in tokens at some point you will break even.
We don't know how much it cost to recreate the Adobe suite, but they aren't the only ones at this game. Just before PhotoCraft was announced someone else created a Photoshop clone called Photon. It has been reported that it cost the developer $2,000 in tokens to produce it and I suspect that the ArtCraft suite cost a similar amount per app.
AI companies are still laughably unprofitable, so the subsidised AI subscriptions will likely disappear soon, and I am sure even the API pricing will need to go up if these companies plan on staying in business.
Even if the current pricing remains, is it really likely that someone is going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to create a buggy version of your app instead of just buying your version?
If you plan on charging a monthly subscription for a desktop app then quite possibly, but if you charge a fair one-off price then I doubt even developers would bother trying to create a clone.
It should also be noted that it is still experienced developers that are creating these applications. The general public are not just vibe coding clones and getting usable software. Developers on the other hand definitely are.
I think the key takeaway from these AI produced clones is not that software is dead but that monthly pricing for desktop apps isn't viable any more and that you probably shouldn't target the developer market.
Everyone else just wants something that works and doesn't want to spend the time maintaining their own applications or using someone's buggy clone.
In other news, researchers discovered this week that 8 private certificate keys for the Indian certificate authority eMudhra were ridiculously weak.
Certificate authorities (CA) are responsible for signing SSL certificates so we know that they are genuine. If you know the private key of a CA and are in a position where you can intercept traffic (such as pretending to be a public Wi-Fi hotspot) then a hacker can use fake certificates to intercept or tamper with data.
The keys are supposed to use the P-384 elliptic curve which would give enough randomness that it would be impossible to break. We are talking 1 followed by 115 zeros of possible values.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Instead, these keys had only single byte numbers. Here are the private keys for the 8 eMudhra certificates 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.
This is literally straight out of an XKCD comic: 
The cause for this blunder hasn't been announced yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone used LLM to help them generate the certificates.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
🔒 Security & Privacy #
Self-Hosting on the Dark Web - I have dabbled with Tor and I2P in the past. I think in the future it will be more common to seek out and use alternatives to the internet as everything becomes more enshitified.
🎨 Design & UX #
10 Tells of a Slop UI - This has a good number of the AI slop tells you see everywhere on the internet now.
🤖 AI #
Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion - Open weight models are a huge threat to AI companies. Once the models become good enough and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware there will be no need for the AI companies and their massive data centres any more.
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector - This is basically the Facebook pixel all over again. As these AI companies struggle to make profit they are turning to profile and ad revenue again.
Transformers Explained Visually - I really like these visual guides and this is a great resource if you want to learn how they work.
Spymarks, not Watermarks - Obviously one solution to this is to not use these LLM models at all but that isn't all spymarks will be used for. It is not beyond tech companies putting these in any document that is on your computer. This isn't great for whistleblowers or anyone else that wants their identity to remain anonymous.
AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You - I really hope No-AI becomes a competitive advantage one day. I don't think they will go away, but I don't want to work in an industry where you have to pay a subscription in order to be competitive.
How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs - Even if you are using AI everyday it is still important to code every once in a while. If you can't code without an LLM then you aren't a developer any more.
Coding Is Not Solved - This is quite a long post, but it is worth a read and makes some good points about AI and our industry at the moment.
There are no "rogue" AI agents - They aren't "rogue", it is just buggy software with poor security practices.
AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity - I am pretty sure this narrative is either to stop open weight models from catching up, or so that the AI companies can slow down the financial bleed.
🏢 Tech Industry #
I said no and Apple said yes - Even if you don't want to use it, AI is being shoved down everyone's throats. I have been having to do a lot of cleanup of my devices recently due to lack of space and I suspect these LLM models being snuck into everything are the cause.
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become? - This is the issue with way tech is going at the moment. We are slowly losing the social aspect of software development. The developer communities are drying up or are being drowned out by slop.
Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free - At least Android has a viable alternative to Google Play. We definitely need an alternative to the App Store.
Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election - Tech really shouldn't get involved in politics, but it seems this is the world we live in now where a bunch of billionaires can dictate everything.
💬 Quote of the Week #
What do you offer that makes you more worthy of my dollar than the other person doing exactly the same thing? What do you most believe in? Why does your business matter? For example, here's one version of my why: “I believe in the magic that happens when people trust themselves."
From The Introvert Engineer by Beth Buelow.
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