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NM Nik Martelaro Nik Martelaro Associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, researching how AI tools can support designers' thinking and creative...

“When people talk about the SaaS Pocalypse, I think one of the worries was companies or groups were going to make their own clones of the software that they were paying for and using. … But actually, this might be the thing that really is a real threat, which is open source projects that have heavy participation from a large community working to make the software better, but then maintaining it as open and free software.”

AI and Design · AI Builders · November 2026

“When people talk about the SaaS Pocalypse, I think one of the worries was companies or groups were going to make their own clones of the software that they were paying for and using. … But actually, this might be the thing that really is a real threat, which is open source projects that have heavy participation from a large community working to make the software better, but then maintaining it as open and free software.” — Nik Martelaro, AI and Design

Context

The hosts were discussing ArtCraft, an open-source clean-room reimplementation of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps built with coding agents. Nik argues that community-maintained clones, rather than companies rebuilding tools in-house, are the real threat to SaaS businesses.

Transcript

AI and Design Around 42:36 into the episode
Nik Martelaro

Oh my gosh, wow.

Dan Saffer

…more like two months or within the next six months or something like that. This is really that this is a really robust thing. I mean, it's crazy. And this was also mostly done by Opus 5.5. And yeah, as the models get better and more people start working on this, wow, it could really change things.

Nik Martelaro

…cadence of every two days. So there's one from two days ago. There's one from four days ago, and then another one from about six or seven days ago. So there's a ton of people now who are actively engaged with this and in trying to make these better and that are actively using them. So it's, this is going to be wild. And in many ways, right, this could be the future of certain pieces of software. When people talk about the SaaS Pocalypse, I think one of the worries was companies or groups were going to make their own clones of the software that they were paying for and using. So one could imagine, I'm going to, you know, in my design shop, we don't want to pay for Photoshop anymore. We're just going to make our own version of Photoshop, right? We have our cloud codes and our codec subscriptions. We're just going to make our own version. But actually, this might be the thing that really is a real threat to the SaaS apocalypse, which is open source projects that have…

Dan Saffer

Right. It's not the building of it. You could make Photoshop in 24 hours, apparently, but it's the maintaining of it. It's the improving of it. It's the fixing of it that is not. Yeah, that if you're a startup, do you want to be doing that? Or if you're a small business, do you want to be doing…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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