It's the same really. There have always been alternatives that can work with Adobe's various file formats. Even more aren't going to change much, at least for their enterprise key customers. This is not only the case for Adobe, but many others as well, e.g. MS office is still a thing these days, and so are things like 3Ds Max or Maya, albeit having many compatible cheaper or even free alternatives. It's not so much about features, pricing or even stability. It's about customer support. Do I want to ask an LLM and test my luck or write a GitHub issue and cross my fingers that someone will read it within the next weeks? No, I will pick up my phone or write a mail and get a response within hours if not minutes.

[delayed]

I ask my llm to write custom software and love the freedom to customize it to my needs. Today I do a presentation on Ubuntu with a new "Presenter" app that works offline, runs 100% in CUDA on GPU and streams videos, starts in 2 seconds, and Opus 5.5 wrote it yesterday. This may sound very unusual, but it will be common in the future: moats disappear one by one.

With no feedback loop and reasonable token use?

"There have always been alternatives that can work with Adobe's various file formats. "

And yet me and quite some others still yearn for a flash alternative. There never was one.

Interesting point that challenges the limits of LLMs!

Any of us could vibe code flash now. How to coordinate it as a dev ecosystem of designers and users?

Does it make sense for everyone to JITVibe presentation apps like the person above? Maybe we'll evolve to branding.

"Any of us could vibe code flash now. "

Surely not just prompting like this and it will one shot it. The usefulness of the flash authoring tool, was it was battle tested and polished.

But I did gave it a shot to took up developement again of abandoned www.wickeditor.com (a web reimplementation of flash). Good results, but limited time and energy for that right now.

I would say that Apple's Create Studio can move toward feature parity faster with Adobe. My point if you're not a platform provider it's going to be harder to make a profit.

The big problem is Photoshop. I have no love for Adobe, I proudly moved my department off of all Adobe products a few years ago. I am a big fan of open source solutions and I am always impressed at what the GIMP team (and some others) have accomplished.

But…

Photoshop is king. Everything else is behind by a solid decade. If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well. It has the professionals are all on it, and because the price isn’t astronomical, that’s what everyone else uses who needs to use that kind of program more than once in a blue moon.

Premier? Replaceable. Lightroom? Pretty replaceable though still somewhat ahead. Photoshop? There’s only one Photoshop. And as much as I’m loathe to give Adobe any credit, it’s the best by a mile. There are too many essential features in QoL things that other programs are missing.

Luckily my department doesn’t need it, but if we did, we would simply have to accept Photoshop.

Not a graphic designer, so, truly asking out of curiosity: what are the QoL things and essential features in Photoshop? I've been slumming it with GIMP for years now and not felt anything very obviously missing, but again I'm not a pro.

Compatibility issues, which can be a huge deal partially due to near-vendor lock in. If you historically been on Photoshop, bringing your working/former projects into another software is not easy, which matters because revisiting work is common.

Not all tools are non-destructive in GIMP. Things like raw support, smart objects, retouching, etc. all either are super thin compared to Photoshop or require workarounds/a lot of manual effort. There are just lots of tools you expect in Photoshop that either don’t exist or exist in an inferior form. I can’t elaborate too much because I don’t really touch Photoshop much these days, but I work with people who do and worked in production long enough to know the expectations. GIMP is great but Adobe is a massive company with deep pockets, it’s hard to keep up. Their user experience is miserable but the tool itself is just far more robust

I'm not sufficiently skilled with Photoshop to gauge how well this replaces it, but you may be interested in this supposed clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

Heard about this! Haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. I’m sure once I have an actual project that needs me to roll up my sleeves with Photoshop I’ll give it a shot. I probably should have mentioned it in my original comment as a possible option

AI is pretty amazing for migrating. source: I'm using Claude to replace a Tableau. What would have taken years is now taking months.