It’s often said that you can’t work professionally without Adobe. But is that really true? As a graphic designer and illustrator, it’s what I learned at school and worked with ever since. Last year, I bought a ThinkPad as a second device and set myself a goal: to find out if I could ditch all Adobe software and find a way to work fully with design tools that run on Linux and, as a bonus, are free and open source. In this talk, I will take you on this journey, discuss the barriers and hiccups I encountered, and explain whether it is possible (for myself at least) to work fully independent of monopolistic software.

Nobody in the room has a better model than anyone else, so the model is not the variable. METR measured experienced developers at 19% slower with AI while they believed they were faster, and a year later measured the same people faster. The difference is the workflow. This talk walks the four layers worth putting underneath a coding agent: context that survives the session, a gate the model cannot skip, architecture rules that run instead of sitting in a README, and tests that actually assert something. You will leave with one you can wire up in an afternoon.