It’s been doing the rounds that someone is giving away clones of all Adobe software, all coded with AI.

And I get it: How many of us yearn to be free from the shackles of every monthly subscription, bleeding us dry, like so many paper cuts?

And to be clear, what Brandon Thomas has done is EXACTLY what smart people should be doing right now, and I applaud him for his ambitious effort, really!

But here’s what people don’t understand yet about building software with AI:

The surface level is just the beginning.

What makes Adobe Adobe isn’t the GUI or the obvious features we can see in Photoshop.

It’s the millions of decisions that have gone into decades of development.

It’s the feedback from millions of designers relying on the tools professionally for their entire careers.

Our regular brains can look at today’s Photoshop and see how its lineage traces back to the very first version, released on Apple computers in 1990.

Software is an organic process. No one could have predicted in 1990 what graphic designers would need in 2027. And yet, many of the design cues from that era are still alive today, just with a different coat of liquid glass on top of them.

Software is a conversation.

And great software is a conversation that’s been running for decades.

So our normal brains understand that commercial software is a process. Our AI mania brains fool us into thinking we can rebuild Adobe’s suite in a weekend.

That’s not true.

We'll never replicate the 30+ years of user feedback, bug reports, and workflow refinements that make the original software truly powerful, or at least, it will take us 30+ years to do it and we’ll have to relearn everything Adobe already knows.

But what IS true is that AI allows more of us to engage in the process of enterprise software building. It democratizes the building of these tools.

Unless you’re willing to devote the next 10+ years of your life to building your weekend clone, one painstaking feature at a time, Adobe will always be worth the money.

AI isn’t a magic bullet. It just democratizes coding, bringing the time and cost down exponentially. It doesn’t mean time, effort, and feedback loops no longer have meaning.

And it takes people like Brandon pushing the envelope of open source software to inspire us all to push harder and dare to dream bigger, and to challenge stagnant corporations.

But we’re all going to learn that the true value of software isn’t the coding. It’s the conversation. And that takes time.

Bad designer: The work is ugly AND doesn’t function well (most live here).

Good designer: The work is beautiful, functions well, but isn’t justifiable with powerful metaphors (most people using AI live here).

Great designer: All the small and large elements form a cohesive whole, in which each element helps tell the larger story (the holy grail!).

The simple question to ask of each component: Why is this element the way it is? Is it random? Is it just a shiny object? Or is there a defensible reason for why it works like that? Why it looks like that?

Do the macro and micro elements work together or against each other? Or was something done just because “it looks cool”?

Apply this ruthlessly, and watch your storytelling get better and better.

I’ve had an agency growing start-ups and scale-ups from zero to millions in fundraising and revenue for ten years, and I was a freelancer for the 15 before that. I’ve worked in and around start-ups for my entire career.

The scariest shift I’ve seen in the start-up landscape? The business in which everyone uses AI to do all the thinking and talking for them.

How can you tell if you’re in this kind of business right now? Easy. All the emails around you just keep getting longer and longer, with no end in sight, as one AI talks to another. What

“That’s a sharp observation, Tina. Here are 14 in-depth ways your email misses the mark.”

I increasingly believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to use AI. The right way is coding and automating mundane, non-human processes.

The wrong way is claiming that you wrote something that AI wrote for you. How many LinkedIn newsletters haven’t written a word in months? How many conferences have devolved into a series of AI-made presentations that all look the same?

A business today in which every employee is just one ChatGPT talking to another ChatGPT may feel productive, because all the conversations look so serious.

But GPT-speak is just papering over real problems much like a shiny new tattoo won’t cover up my beer gut. Sorry bud, you’re here to stay.

You can’t serious-speak your way to a successful company. You have to build something of real value.

And marketing a real business is about more than just shoving a bunch of semi-technical jargon onto an AI-made template. It’s about communicating an idea effectively and here’s what people tend to forget: communicating it simply.

Sadly, we’re all going to have to send our BS detectors into overdrive over the next several years, as more and more people around us get suckered into the dark side of AI.

I’m just glad I’m not a VC right now.

The one and only Conan O’Brien.

And I got to have a conversation with him about how the man who can so effortlessly give a poignant Harvard commencement address can also do a fake Bollywood song in India called “Namaste In Your Lane” or prance around as Van Gogh in my old home of Amsterdam.

I’m a Simpsons kid. My dad was probably a bad parent, because he let a 5-year-old watch every episode.

So I knew Conan as a TV writer before he even had his talk show.

I’ve admired how he packages intelligence into comedy for my whole life.

But here’s what we talked about:

Intelligent people spot patterns. They have strong opinions. And other comedians that I respect, like John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver, have turned their opinions into the show. They are experts at comedy, but they wield their comedy like a weapon.

Conan wields his comedy like a rubber chicken.

I’ll admit that it’s hard for me not to be polarizing about some of the things I see in our world. When I start typing, God only knows what’s gonna come out!

But what Conan does that so, so, so few people on planet earth have managed to do is: He walks a comedic tightrope between intelligent and absurd that never leans on politics or the desire to make a point. The joke is the point.

He’s stayed married to one person. He hasn’t self-destructed with drugs or alcohol. He’s taken care of his entire team (even during Covid), who are also lovely people by the way.

There are people out there who have achieved some of what he has, but when you add it all up, no one I can think of has done it all, for so long.

And talking to him? I can tell you it is no accident. He’s just somebody who’s smart enough to realize he can have everything he wants if he stays focused on what truly matters.

There’s a powerful lesson in that.

It takes thoughtful work and conscious effort to build a life and career on that frequency—on that vibration.

All I can say is, I’m buzzing, that’s for sure.

#Lifegoals right here.

Growing a single SoundCloud channel from a few thousand followers to a network of nearly a million.

To build that platform, I had to listen to thousands of submissions every week and make hard decisions. In addition to making a weekly DJ mix show, I posted at least 5 songs per day, 7 days a week for years. No days off. I even missed National Donut Day, TWICE. What the hell was I thinking!?

But dealing with so many mp3s, I had to develop systems. In fact, I got a repetitive stress injury from using my computer basically around the clock with no breaks. While others were content to do everything by hand, I was always building scripts to auto-name, add artwork, and tag the files to make my job easier. Automation was essential to produce the kind of volume needed to keep the engine running.

That was 2012.

Now I do the same thing with AI, just much faster, and across a much larger set of small tools.

The money for most of us today isn’t in creating a software subscription that’s going to change the world or make us a quick million. Instead, it’s in making small improvements to the thousands of inefficiencies each of us witness and deal with daily.

We can probably each sustain around three major software projects at any given time that we can go deeper on, that require multiple months or even years to build. And in between that, I estimate that we can each craft dozens to hundreds of little tools that make our lives, and probably no one else’s, smarter and better.

This is the kind of efficiency waiting for all of us with AI coding. No more, no less.

Does everyone need these tools? No. But if you are in an industry or endeavor where volume and speed are important, this is the main benefit you should be thinking about.