[concinds]

Yeah, the pain/reward ratio is against vibecoded replacements for mature tools. Piracy is cheaper than tokens.

But over the next 5 years I expect a growth in Blender-like open-source projects aiming to take on the big closed-source elephants. Code is cheaper now. The main downside of LLM coding, unmaintainable spaghetti code, can be mitigated effectively with discipline and coordination.

You still need maintainers to uphold contribution standards, but people will throw tokens at you. A small, disciplined team can go a long way, make a decent enough product, and then attract the institutional money (like Blender did) and hit that growth curve where everyone rallies you and you've won.

Lots of companies would have a vested interest in reducing these dependencies to Adobe et al., or have a more customizable product. Competitive professional tools, more like Blender and less like GIMP, but in other areas, like DAWs, CADs, and others.