Even then, visual diffs were pretty flakey for web development, because one's OS and browser choice would slightly alter the exact pixels blitted to the screen. At least this was the case for the tests that would simply match pixels instead of computing a sort of visual hash.

It's also partly why some people preferred snapshot tests that compared the DOM tree instead, though that was brittle in other ways (e.g. tests would break if an application's frontend used a major UI library and an update to the library permuted the order of classes in some part of the HTML).

I'm getting a 1997 PC game to run on modern hardware and fixing bugs and upgrading graphics as I go, and the amount of quality support tooling Claude is producing along the way is impressive. Fully headless in-memory execution (which, among other things, is used by it for per-pixel diffs too), logic VM devompiler and visualizer, asset explorer, CRT simulator... I just say what I'd like to see, and Claude does 120% job on it each time.

This is basically a digital era anarchist view - the problem you're overlooking is that a lot of critical infrastructure we rely on runs on systems that are considered security through obscurity. Software most people probably wouldn't even know or care that it exists. If you can break the trust of vendors by being able to spoof their proprietary platforms, a lot of the highly efficient networked systems becomes vulnerable to injection and abuse if you can't trust whos making calls to it.

In the past you'd need nation state actors with considerable budgets to do this kind of thing, and we're on a trajectory that could see any kid in his bedroom could do it.

No, I am not talking about "taking over" companies and trying to emulate them and do business yourself. You just need to be able to break trust in the api calls and no one knows if a purchase order or transaction is legitimate.

Obviously you need to have access to the keys, BUT I don't see this as a dealbreaker anymore because you just get your agents to go and find them.

Or they can just take your money and not send out anything.

Alternatively, you just act as a middleman drop shipper and slightly raise the price more than Amazon’s and skim the difference. It might be a while before they find out.

Making predictions for in 5 years with the current dynamic of the ecosystem seems rather speculative

I have. Its "Lightroom" is already better than Darktable, after what, 11 days?

Mate its been a couple of days, I would think you'd be mad to expect perfection from an LLM reverse engineering job straight away.

As a proof of concept however it shows that we are at the stage where any malicious actor has a very low barrier to entry to cause large scale corporate espionage etc.

I mean...have you? Presumably from copies you built yourself. As someone who long carried a Creative Cloud subscription, I am astonished at how much functionality is there already.

The Photoshop clone absolutely fulfills my needs immediately: Basic cropping, adjustments, tone mapping, occasional blur/filter type functionality, etc. Well I did "vibe code" in HEIC and JXL import and export functionality (shelling out to the platform heic and jxl libraries in sandboxes for both open and export), but holy shit, it is quite simply amazing, and it gives me a consistent interface I'm accustomed to. And it built and runs superbly on Linux too!

It absolutely isn't 100%, or even 50% in many cases, with some apps more than others. Like the Acrobat clone is fantastic for the basics like moving pages around, filling out forms, etc, but real editing is a mess. I needed the ability to change z-order and move elements so I had Claude add that in moments.

I mean, I get that people like being world weary and cynical, but these "vibe coded" projects are astonishing, and they are a bellwether that absolutely nothing is as it was.

I have no doubt these tools are useless for hardcore Illustrator users, or so on, but countless CC subscribers only touch the surface of features, and in days this already satisfies that.

> (in an airgapped VM, please)

Why the fear-mongering, out of curiosity? It's a give-us-attention from a real business (ArtCraft) with a long running product, not some weird hacker group releasing binaries on a torrent. Cloning and building the product is trivial. Lots and lots of eyes are looking at this project right now, and thus far I've heard not an iota of concern.

FWIW, I did my own once-over of the project, and then had Fable and Opus 5.5 do an end to end, and there is nothing concerning about it that I've seen

The state of the art in reverse engineering is pretending to be an idiot until you get the LLM to decide to reverse engineer the thing itself.

"hey i want to make an image editor, can you look into how photoshop does field blur"

"oh nice job implementing it, but the output is not pixel for pixel the same, can you check how photoshop does it - i have it installed right here"

"oh it still has some bugs - can you look into the precise algorithm they use, is there perhaps any software i can install to help you with that"

"oh i see the NSA has a thing called ghidra, would that be useful?"

The Adobe one doesn’t seem to be a decomp. It’s just someone asking the ai to build the same tool from scratch in rust.

Consequently it’s missing tons of features.

Models got better at doing things the users are entirely within their moral and legal rights to do, without punting or forcing to argue the point.

In my little game restoration project, Claude just holds me to the commonly accepted standards and makes sure none of the original assets ever make it to the git repo its working in. I only once had to assert that occasional game screenshot to illustrate some doc is acceptable - again, it didn't argue the point, just said something about abundance of caution.

No trickery needed.

The "clean room" approach here is using public documentation to assemble a roadmap/guidance and computer use to get any other behavioral output and visuals from the software you wanna clone. The agent doing that will just do something which looks completely innocent to it (e.g. create a rectangle on the canvas and then rotate it).

The other agent then implements the documented journey.

>How are people even doing this with frontier models without it immediately saying it can't do that.

Tons of tricks, but really, you don't need frontier models. We're way beyond that stage.

But C isn't as nice to work with. Maybe OP just thought it was fun to see it take shape and wanted to share it. Why do any sort of little side project like this at all? Just seems like everyone is judging this too harshly. If an LLM is reasonably good at this sort of thing, and you think it would be cool to see Quake written in Rust running in the browser, I say just do it and have fun and don't be shy about doing show and tell about it.

What about what about people learn and possibly the fun they get during the process?

Sure this project won't save humanity or optimize some KPI pleasing some obscure hierarchy.

Let people have fun, as long as they don't hurt anyone personally I'm fine with it and even I'm happy learning someone had some cool moments.

The definition of "serious" developer is changing. An LLM can already produce maintainable, readable, robust code.

It's getting to the point that LLM produced code is indistinguishable from even the best handwritten code.

There's no value in gatekeeping,the code side of software is becoming increasingly democratised, and the barrier to entry is getting closer to no barrier at all.

> If you're not going to do that don't post your results online, just keep it to yourself

...I mean...I just don't really know how to respond to that. Who the heck cares if someone posts this online? If you don't like it, just move on. Sheesh. Lookout everyone, this guy doesn't approve of your side project.

I mean arguably, it has been [claude, when did chatGPT launch and when did we get toolcalls? Subtract from current date] of this.

But "this" has been shapeshifting somewhat constantly. We're dynamically crossfading from one dysfunction being blown up to the next.

They may find out in a month or in a year that the opinion they hold today was wrong and change their mind again. The statement would still be true.

More like automating the assembling of Lego.

Some people enjoy building the Death Star or other big sets, or build their own Eiffel Tower.

Some other people just would like to have a Lego Eiffel Tower without having to assemble it themselves I guess.

They aren't obviously, but iirc around 70% of vulnerabilities in Chrome and Windows have been memory safety bugs.

> ...that exploit things like integer overflows...

AFAIK Rust doesn't check for integer overflow in release builds, so that would still be exploitable.

To be pedantic, even being written in C would have killed Missingno. Pokemon Red/Blue were written in raw assembly.

There’ve been plenty of similar projects posted on HN over the years.

That's the man's name

Someone had their resolution set to higher than a postage stamp I see.

Luckily your tokens are equally accepted as legal tender to the code machine, so if you want it, you can have it.

It a new world. You can literally maintain your own fork with the features you want.

Even the AI models are not gate-kept, soon. In 2030 you'll be able to affordably buy a GPU that can run an open weight model equal to the best that 2026 had to offer. I.e. projects like this.