The Cambrian Explosion (of software)

Early in the days of Earth life was mostly single-celled according to geologists and archaeologists. However, a little over 500 million years ago the geological record explodes with multi-cellular lifeforms. The so called "fossil record" tells us that life on earth exploded at this time, and with it the exploration of new genetic combinations and environmental adaptations that brought about bipedal organisms like men (and chickens).

For reasons I won't get into here I am generally skeptical of claims dating back before ~2000-5000 years before now, so I take these stories with a bit of salt, but I won't let the analogy take over here: we are living through this very same microcosm of explosive life in terms of software!

getartcraft.com has recently cloned the adobe suite in it's entirety, in rust, open source, for free. Not only this, but the whole thing has a launcher, it's fast, and they work well! I don't own microsoft office licenses, and now I don't really need to, and once upon a time I paid adobe a few bucks for photoshop (well, my mom did haha) but man it just isn't great to be trapped into predatory subscription services unless you are an enterprise. Even then!

This is going to become fairly common, and I would argue merely cloning is going to become old hat. Far better to build native tooling for agents to do these than to simply provide a free clone of existing work. "Reverse Engineer Anything" is a powerful idea, and I'm not sure pandora will be too pleased with the contents of this box.

I wonder, too, about the money. This doesn't mean apps suddenly become free, it means the necessity of proprietary services hidden behind HTTP are going to have to become the norm. SaaS doesn't die, it becomes the only way to operate.

Needless to say Yegge was right and competent platforms are still gonna win. The best play is to get out of the way and build a road, not a gate.