All those AI decompilations

If you have been at all active on the internet lately you have probably seen masses celebrating the death of Adobe, as LLM generated photoshop clones and decompilations flood the worlds git forges with fully fledged websites, promising READMEs and a promise of cutting of our dependence on Adobe subscriptions once and for all!!

The development of which of course, is entierly dependent on a new form of subscription, to another massive corporation, which will of course never commit any of the evils Adobe have.

First, do not get me wrong, I love seeing Adobe suffer just as much as the next person, and I find these projects incredibly interesting from a technical standpoint, even when unstable and buggy. Steal photoshop, reimplement it, I do not care, I am happy if you are given tools to create. But do not be fooled, the LLM “frontier labs” are not your friends.

Services like Claude Code operate on a loss and using relatively affordable subscriptions for a reason, they want you to grow reliant on them. It always starts the same way, a company creates a service which is genuinely useful¹, be it Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Foodora, Spotify, or Photoshop. The newfound convenience of the service slowly renders all competitors moot, leaving them as the main provider in the space. Then, they leverage the lack of options in order to implement hostile business decisions, with the goal of ultimately turning a profit.

The convinience of Amazon has killed of many local stores filled with knowledgable professionals; Netflix and Spotify have taken away our ability to actually own our media, and introducted a new middle-man to cut into the artists profits; Uber made generations of experienced Taxi drivers without a job; Foodora and the likes have been able to crank up prices while still neglecting workers², Adobe started charging expensive subscription fees from already struggling freelance artists.

Now what do the LLM companies sell you? Your productivity, your ability to work, to develop software, to do research, to write, to skim through text, and to some degree, the ability to think. Once we live in the promised post-piracy, post-subscription LLM decompilation world, once classical software development is merely a hobby and no one can compete with the speed of agentic workloads, how much leverage will they hold over us?

It is up to you how much the convenience is worth it, I won’t shun anyone for using Spotify, and I can’t find myself doing it for people using LLMs either. I hate the way AI is shoved down our throat currently, the way governments are irresponsible, the fact that operating at huge losses is somehow completely fine, and that these companies seemingly have no sense of responsibility, but I can’t find it in my to hate you for using it.

Personally I am trying to avoid its usage as much as I reasonably can. I chose to become a programmer, a coder, to write code. I find beauty in the code I write, it’s a craft of mine, and I do not want my own style, quirks, and skills to be dulled down and replaced with an industrial scale auto-complete.