Sigh... are we really just going to re-invent plugins?

We do need a safe layer for non-engineers to customize apps.

All these clones of Photoshop and similar tools are mostly dead ends, they are experiments to see if you can do it, but there will be a consolidation around regularly maintained and powerful and complete apps that likely also offer support.

These experiments are dead-ends for the most part long-term. Fun play things, but they will not gain significantly user bases.

Isn't this more of an argument to use common OSS choices? Like, encourage people to use Blender for 3d modelling; LibreOffice for documents; Gimp, Krita, or one of the many other art programs for ... art; OBS for simple video stuff; and so on and so forth?

> We do need a safe layer for non-engineers to customize apps.

Why? Every time someone cripples software in the name of safety it just gets replaced with more capable software that isn't.

Plugins have long been troubled. It’s hard to make a plugin interface that is actually useful while also not breaking on every app update. And plugins have been such a massive vector for distributing malware.

I guess I'm too used to the collaboration features of word processors like Google Docs. If I build my own, those go out the window otherwise everyone has to sign up for my word processor and learn my word processor's UX.

For the rest, at least so far, I haven't had the collaboration experience but for word processors I can't go back to local files that can't easily be edited/viewed/commented on by multiple people

yes but tons of new features introduced making things interesting

We have existing tools for this. You fork the repo of the closest thing and have AI tune it to exactly what you want.

I'm pretty sure this already happens to some extend. Look at the default website output you get from the different models, there tends to be a 'default' look/approach it takes.

I think they all have been post-trained on specific tasks like building sites, apps, etc and that is a large part of the reason they are pretty good at it.

Honestly i think that now is the chance for established software to go with the flow and I think the major way to go with the flow is create are adapt software to be extensible (so that everyone can let claude or opencode or whatever add their functionality of choice without having to rebuilt the wheel from scratch everytime) and secondly direct mcp access to the software itself.