I just tried pdf craft on fdroid and really liked it, but its on beta and only 2 versions released.
Is it going to be well maintained and become an alternative or just stay unstable ai dlop? It had more stars on github than some other pdf viewers.
Whats your take on that. I am excited to see some decent apps on linux. Especially for .appimage and launching instantly unlike photoshop.
I’ve been using them happily, and they do what I need. So, to me, this is real useful software that’s replacing proprietary solutions.
I mean I love that they are sticking it to Adobe but they are slop by nature. If it’s at least useful slop or if you should just use the actual open-source alternatives is debatable, I don’t have any talent with these programs anyway. I’d say learn the open-source alternatives but maybe try the artcraft stuff if you truly can’t do something in the open-source program, but that’s just my uneducated opinion.
The current business model of the big LLM providers is unsustainable. They are burning money to get people hooked. Which means maintaining and developing these applications will become a lot more expensive, once the providers need to make money. If these projects don’t have a solid plan for this event, they’ll probably just get abandoned.
That’s only true for the US though. Electricity costs in China are a third of what they are in the states, and open models are now becoming very competitive. We can also see here that DeepSeek is already close to breaking even. The other factor is that models continue to get more efficient, and even local models like Qwen 27b can do serious work. Especially, when combined with good tooling. A coding harness that uses Qwen with five different roles scores as well as Anthropic Fable on the benchmarks.
Also unsustainable: the code they generate.
It’s huge, sprawling and messy.
Can you point to which part specifically are you referring to here? https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
there’s deepseek and a lot of other local models.
Yes sure, local models exist. But somehow the big flashy projects use the big flashy models. Local models are usable, but not as capable as the big cloud models, to which they have tied their development practice.
if you look at benchmarks the difference is almost negligible, and there is nothing tying your development practice to claude or whatever. i constantly switch between agents and nothing stops me or changes my workflow when i do this. a new model can pick up instantly where another left, and once the western model is doomed deepseek will still be there running on your local machine.
My local machine is dead and I can’t afford new ram.
and you owe that to big llm western models run on massive data centers, deepseek is here to disrupt that. once the imperial monoliths fall consumer grade products will become cheaper and you will hopefully be able to get a new machine. i say this from argentina my friend, my country besides being fucked has import restrictions on technology which make buying hardware even more expensive than for people in the anglosphere.
I just hope it will collapse very soon, this whole “let’s burn more fossil fuels to run LLMs” thing is way too depressing. I actually enjoy programming and this timeline makes me sad.
I’ve checked its girhub before and photocraft has a lot of contributors, over 400. But the apps are made mostly by claude code. Personally id never use these apps but so far theyvebeen receiving updates quickly with humans adding new bugfixes (humans or maybe more vibe coders…).
I installed the flatpak out of curiosity and these artxraft apps receive updates fast in my opinion, a d they add more things like a reverse engineer app or solidcraft thing.
in my opinion, even with human bugfixes and that, its still slop, I trust other foss alternatives.
This raises another question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while - at what point does a slop project stop being slop? Say I one shot a slop app and then continue to iterate on it with human-written commits. Or I find a vibe coded app I think has potential, fork it and then iterate on it. At what point does this become non-slop, or does it ever?
In my opinion is possible to stop being slop, if an app is very well made thanks to human checks (like fix garbage code made by llms). Llms can’t be trusted to competely write code imo, but if a good programmer knows how to use llms to improve their workflow I think that’s a good llm usage.
artcraft apps are too new and still have a lot of bugs, but maybe someday it will be more useful in my opinion.
If the code is checked by humans, like on the linux kernel for example, id say I trust it. And I dont think its slop.
and llms have great uses for programming in my opinion, like the opensuses OpenQA, etc. ai has found cves on linux too which is a great usage for it. what I disloke its that some people think that by using tons of tokens they can be programmers by just prompting something…
Artcraft, has a problem that they release quantity over quality, there are like 15 apps now and they aren’t well tested… but who knows, maybe in the future it gets better. Maybe id change my mind of it being slop
I keep hearing people talk about trust, and it’s really doesn’t make sense to me because we’ve never done software development based on trust. Humans make mistakes all the time, and I’ve seen plenty far worse human code than anything an LLM has crapped out over my career. The way we ensure quality is through having a process. It’s done by having good specifications, testing, code reviews, planning, and so on. All these things equally apply to code written by hand and that’s generated by an LLM, and trust has nothing to do with it.
My tinfoil conspiracy theory is that artcraft is actually a 5d chess move from the “anti-ai” camp to draw bigtech attention and get them to turn against LLMs on principle, or at least get them to implement some sort of anti-app-cloning thing like anthropic recently did for games.
Not really but that’d be funny i suppose.
I tried photocraft and it’s certainly usable. The video editor however wouldn’t play anything I added to the timeline at all. I also tried the MS word clone and it’s just janky-looking (like the text formatting seems to change if I click on the page? Hard to explain). I’d take pirated PS over it anyday though. One thing I can say is that photocraft is very fast to launch compared to Photoshop.
100% slop
