The home-cooked app! Here we go again! Every few months, the tech world collectively loses its mind over a brand-new apocalyptic headline. This week’s contender? “Software is over.” Again! First SAAS was dead, now Adobe is done!
It came courtesy of a developer named Brandon Thomas, who got so thoroughly fed up with Adobe’s cancellation fees and predatory subscription traps (honestly, who hasn’t been bitten by that dark-pattern nonsense?) that he fired up Claude Opus and decided to clone their entire empire out of pure, unadulterated spite.
I can relate to be honest! Good on him!
Over a weekend, he rolled out Artcraft: seven open-source, Rust-based clean-room replicas of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and the rest of the gang. He proudly declared that he’d “one-shotted Photoshop” and promised 100% feature parity in mere months. Cue the inevitable panic on Ars Technica: if one bloke with an LLM can recreate thirty years of enterprise software between sips of coffee, the entire software industry must be heading straight for the nearest open grave.
It sounds dramatic. It sounds revolutionary. It’s also completely missing the point of how humans actually live their lives. (You know what I mean!)
Whenever this breathless “nobody will ever pay for code again” chatter on Social Media such as X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the others kicks off, I find myself returning to a comparison I use all the time: dinner.
Stay with me here, I know it sounds a bit strange or even bonkers at first, but let’s think about food for a second.
Almost every adult I know has a kitchen. You’ve got pots, pans, a hob, and access to fresh ingredients down at the local shop. You have endless recipe books, step-by-step video tutorials, and air fryers that practically cook the meal for you. In theory, every single one of us could prepare fresh, wholesome, perfectly balanced meals at home three times a day for a fraction of the price of eating out.
Yet, restaurants are packed.
The fact that you can fry an egg or roast a chicken at home doesn’t mean Michelin-starred restaurants are boarding up their windows, nor does it stop the local street food stall from making a roaring trade. Why? Because possessing the capability to cook does not mean you actually want to stand over a hot stove every single night! Cooking takes time, energy, and mental focus. And let’s be brutally honest: after a long, exhausting day of work, washing up greasy frying pans is the very last thing on earth anyone wants to do. (Or at least, I want to do…)
Building software with modern AI has simply turned coding into home cooking.
Right now, anyone with a bit of patience and an AI assistant can walk into their digital kitchen and whip up a bespoke tool. If you need a hyper-specific utility to clean up a messy spreadsheet, or a quick little interactive app for your class, you don’t need to wait six months for an IT department or swallow a ridiculous $30-a-month subscription. You just cook it up yourself. That is brilliant, liberating, and long overdue.
At the same time, we still have an entire culinary ecosystem, and it isn’t going anywhere.
You have your street food vendors and local diners; these are your agile indie developers building lean, single-purpose apps that solve an immediate headache without five layers of corporate bloat. You have your supermarket ready-meals and takeaway pizza; that’s the commercial off-the-shelf software we happily throw money at simply because we want convenience in two minutes flat without thinking about it. And then you have the Michelin-star kitchens: the enterprise giants where you aren’t just paying for the raw ingredients, but for meticulous sanitation standards, insurance, flawless execution, and a brigade of specialists making sure the soufflé doesn’t collapse under pressure. (And no, I’m not talking about iSAMS, or am I?)
That last bit is where the “software is over” crowd trips over their own hype.
Cloning the visual interface of Photoshop with an AI agent is a neat party trick, but it’s a bit like putting plastic wax fruit in a restaurant display window: it looks tasty from the street, but you really wouldn’t want to take a bite! The shiny buttons and toolbars are only 5% of the battle. The other 95% is thirty years of invisible, soul-crushing plumbing; colour profile calibration, hardware acceleration across thousands of weird graphics cards, memory leak prevention, and bulletproof stability when a designer is working on a 4GB file with eighty layers five minutes before a hard print deadline. Yes the versions that were created are incredible, and for the majority of Adobe users they will suffice! That being said will Adobe go away overnight? Have creatives left and right not built their entire livelihood around this software?
More to the point: when your home-cooked script falls over on a Tuesday morning because of an OS update, guess who’s on tech support? You are. When you buy software, you aren’t just buying compiled code; you are paying someone else to do the washing up and take the blame if the food arrives cold!
What is actually being disrupted here isn’t the craft of software development, but lazy software business models. For years, tech conglomerates have coasted on captive audiences, locking people into bloated subscriptions with cancellation fees designed by corporate pickpockets. When an indie developer armed with modern AI tools can spin up a lightweight, highly functional alternative in a fraction of the time, that artificial moat vanishes into thin air.
And let’s be real for a second: developers who stubbornly refuse to touch AI today because of “tradition” are like chefs who refuse to use a food processor because they’d rather chop five sacks of onions by hand with a dull knife. It’s not noble, it’s just silly! A smart developer uses these tools to skip the boring prep work so they can spend their real energy on flavour, structure, and quality checks.
So, will more people cook at home? Absolutely. We’re going to see a fantastic boom in custom, personal tools and sensible alternatives to bloated subscriptions. But will the entire world suddenly start coding their own operating systems, video editors, and productivity suites from scratch?
Not a chance. If human nature worked like that, we’d all be sitting around eating home-made sourdough and five-star tasting menus every single day of the week!
Software isn’t dead. The kitchen doors have just been kicked wide open, and the menu is finally getting interesting.
This was first posted on SethiDeClercq.com and ReadySetCompute
