We're going to take back the internet and own tech forever.
I know I have a few anti-AI haters on HN, but hear me out. I'm currently using Opus 5.5 to create 100% pure-Rust, immediate mode rendering, open source implementations of Adobe's entire suite:
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (Photoshop)
https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (Illustrator)
https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft (Premiere)
https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft (Lightroom)
https://github.com/storytold/printcraft (Acrobat Pro)
https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft (After Effects)
https://github.com/storytold/designcraft (InDesign)
I got bit by the dark pattern "cancellation fee" one too many times.
AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-shitty era. But now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you.
We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.
Big tech sowed the seeds of their own commodification with AI. It's all going to come down now that we can rebuild everything without toiling for years to even get close to scaling software capability moats.
The internet is going to reset to 1990-2004 (pre-facebook / "web 2.0" era). The indie web era. Everything is going to be reborn as open source.
We're going to own it all.
> But now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room
You're not doing this clean-room, if Claude is running Photoshop and studying it while writing code. You do not have a clean room.
> We're going to own it all.
We don't even own the AI that is building all of this.
One day, RAM prices will settle again, and the USA-China race will probably keep giving us fresh models to self-host (weights only, but still.)
That's not too far from owning it.
>That's not too far from owning it.
It's still not owning it. It's still proprietary with extra steps.
Writing the code yourself and distributing it freely to a community capable of understanding, contributing to or editing it is owning it.
Will any human ever be able to understand, contribute to or edit these apps? Or will they only ever be edited and updated by AI? Removing the human element is removing ownership.
Hey, you sound a lot like me. We are old-fashioned to the point of being doomed dinosaurs.
We are at least in good company. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was an unimaginably huge lump of soulless dirt, too.
You totally can. You just gotta shell out at least $2.5k for a good GPU, but then you own it. These big open-weight models aren't nearly as good as Opus 5.5 but I find them to be about as good as the big models were a year ago. It's only a matter of time until we catch up.