Readit NewsI don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.
It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.
Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
copy/paste for posterity:
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Hey everyone, my name is Mike Chambers, and I work on the community team at Adobe (and am a long time Flash / Animate user). Yesterday, Adobe shared an email with Adobe Animate customers on the future of Animate. What we shared did not meet our standards and caused a lot of confusion and angst within the community. On behalf of Adobe, I want to apologize.
While an email to all Animate customers will go out shortly, I wanted to quickly share a few things: 1) our standard approach for applications in maintenance mode, 2) changes to our plans for Adobe Animate and its status, and 3) our commitments to ensuring that you always have access to your content, regardless of the state of development of an application.
# Standard Approach for Applications in Maintenance Mode
If we deprioritize active development of an application, our approach is to move that application into maintenance mode with continued support. Under maintenance mode, the application will continue to be available, will continue to receive security and bug fixes, but will not get new features.
If we decide to go a step further and discontinue a product, we will work closely with the community to ensure they have adequate time to plan in order to minimize disruption and will take steps so that the community continues to have long-term access to their content.
# Current State of Adobe Animate
Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode. While we are no longer adding new features to Animate, we will continue to support it and provide ongoing security and bug fixes. More importantly, Animate will continue to be available for both new and existing users. This is a change from what we communicated in the email yesterday for the status of Adobe Animate, its time-frame, and availability.
To be clear, we are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate and it will continue to be available to both existing and new customers.
# Commitments for long-term content/file Access
For Adobe Animate, our commitment is to work with the community to ensure users continue to have long term access to their content, regardless of the state of development of the application.
You can find the latest information on our website:
https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/maintenance-mode.html
On a personal note, as someone who started their career with Macromedia Flash 3 and Macromedia Generator, Adobe Animate has a special place in my heart. I know how frustrating and stressful this has been and we clearly could have handled and communicated this better. I might not have answers to everything, but I will try to answer any questions you might have.
> To be clear, this isn't a "clarification". This is a change. We are literally changing our plans. [...] None of this was handled well.
> Starting March 1, 2026, the app will no longer be available for purchase.
>> I have already downloaded Animate. Will the app still work? > Yes. Animate will continue to work.
I wish they were more explicit in describing exactly for how long - being subscription-based, it's not really something you purchase and own to run for eternity regardless of Adobe. So, will new CC subscriptions have access to Animate? Will the Animate app even run after March 2027?
if you look at it as in investment in understanding the code base more than just closing the ticket as soon as possible, then the 'lets see what really going on here' approach makes more sense.
Me neither, for what is worth. But even if the idea is "when in order to figure out this issue, you have to go to the history", a linear history and a linear log never helped me either. For example, to find where a certain change happened to try to understand what was the intent, what I need is the commit and its neighbors, which works just as well with linear vs branching history because the neighbors are going to still be nearby up and down, not found via visual search.
How do you define "clean"? I've certainly been aided by commit messages that help me identify likely places to investigate further, and hindered by commit messages that lack utility.
In the context of merge vs rebase, I think "clean" means linear, without visible parallel lines. Quality of commit messages is orthogonal. I agree with the poster that this particular flavor of "clean" (linear) has never ever helped me one bit.
Also this visa in uncapped so giving visas to OF models does not take away anything from scientists and others.
O visa's original intent was to help pretty ladies from Eastern Europe to be brought into the country as indentured workers. That is why it is so easy to get this visa for an actor or a fashion model but very tough to get someone for their research.
So all this is working as intended.
I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure.
Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g... that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for months.
Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you all the proof of life you want. Try me.
Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah... it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building block. My personal projects (that I do think are magical) kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different ways, and they all ended up in the same place.
So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust. And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.
At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues <-- my fault).
Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"... You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and philosophy.
I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets you do different things.
- https://hl-inside.me/magazines/pc-gamer-us/PC-Gamer_2000-11_...