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.