You may have seen the recent headlines about the developer Brandon Thomas and co-founder Michael Caffrey using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to build clean-room, open-source clones of seven major Adobe programs written in Rust.
As we have been calling out on this podcast, the media and certain podcasters and influencers suggested that, thanks to AI vibe coding, this small team could “decompile” and recreate Adobe’s major software products and threaten Adobe’s future forever. Obviously, this is not true!
Carl examined this claim and explained why early prototypes are not the same as polished, production-ready replacements, as people might think. His experience testing an AI-built editing tool showed missing features and familiar workflows that simply were not available.
The discussion explores why people and businesses continue to rely on established software like Adobe, even when alternatives exist do exist and whether AI-powered vibe coding has any place in the real world.
More critically, we discussed why reliability, existing workflows, support, and the career value of learning widely used tools still all matter. It is not just about price or feature lists, certainly not in the enterprise world.
We also consider how subscription fatigue and customer frustration can create opportunities for competitors and new startups.
Carl distinguishes reverse engineering – recreating software behaviour from observation and specifications – from decompiling, which attempts to turn compiled software back into readable code. He argues that media coverage often blurs the terms, making a story sound more dramatic than the technical reality supports.
The broader takeaway from our discussion is that AI can amplify skilled developers and speed up early work. However, complex debugging, reliable products, and sound judgment still require expertise that AI can never replicate. We apply this same call for nuance to AI security, SaaS, hiring, and media coverage. You must look past the headline and ask what was actually built and how well it works.
Join the conversation and tell us if you think vibe coding creates more problems than solutions, especially if used by individuals who have never coded or built software and technology businesses.
