I'm not a Photoshop user, but I was a GIMP user since my Linux years, and recently I've vibe-coded my own alternative. Why?
Easy, I wanted a middle-ground thing. Gimp, especially in Mac, is riddled with bugs, and it's a very heavy tool. The default Apple preview thing is okay for a single rotation or overlaying text, but not for other simple transformations. I wanted something in the middle.
I'm browsing my photo library, see a crooked image, quick uncrook it with a couple of clicks. I'm def not a "pro", so I don't care about 8k x 8k images or similar. Gimp is too heavy for this workflow, and the default mac app too light. I also prefer it to be offline, so I coded my own alternative.
I only got like 10~20% there few years ago coding by hand, even though I spent something like 1.5~2 weeks on it. I basically built the automated organization and visualization part (datetime extraction, adding tags, removing duplicates, thumbnails, etc), but none of the transformation tools. Now, thanks to LLMs, I've been able to build most of the things I wanted and meaningfully more in a couple of days, _inluding_ processing and editing videos, as well as these for images: perspective cropping, normal cropping, contrast, saturation, resizing, format conversion, etc:
I’d usually follow that logic that using AI models(that basically trained on everything it could get hands on without regard for people’s labor and effort) to steal someone’s right to get paid for their effort. But, this is Adobe we are talking about…
1. Nobody asked them to bundle PhotoShop with all the cloud features and force it down their user’s throat.. Adobe Photoshop as a tool could easily be a one-time paid per version software. Want assets and things only possible in the cloud? Here is an optional cloud feature that costs $x should be the logical default.
Force your users to pay for stuff they didn’t ask for and lock them them in for years?
It feels morally justified that they get wrecked by AI models replicating their tool. If they are legitimately that good that one needs their Cloud justified content, perhaps they will still pay for Adobe. But, that’s all they are entitled to at this point.
I would not brush them off like this though, maybe they are the dev working on photoshop's brush, or brush is just the most basic tool in such software that it makes an easy comparison.
This, and also as an amateur once-in-a-while user of 2 apps, I don't get why I have to pay the same price as professionals using 5 or more apps every day.
There's a lot of comments about how these projects could never be used seriously, but I don't use these programs seriously. I take photos for fun and I make posters for events. I'll happily take the vibecoded lightroom and photoshop for free and it runs on Linux natively.
For anyone in this situation - first upgrade your subscription to a different tier, wait a day for the account to reflect you are on a new test, then you cancel with the 7 day right to cancel. That way you avoid early cancellation fees
This feels like it is a brilliant loop hole, but knowing adobe there is a 20% chance that this backfires and you are now stuck with a higher tier of billing for a minimum of one more year.
This. I had to create a temporary card with my banking app (Monzo), then I could switch out the payment method on my adobe account. Then I could cancel the temp card and then finally Adobe can die whilst trying to charge my cancelled card.
They wanted me to pay £80 to cancel, I’d had the account for 10 years so no idea what the cancellation related to.
I've told this story before but I had to tell their scum support that I had cancer before they'd cancel my account. They just flat out refused. It was almost impressive in a way.
I hear that groups are using AI to reverse-engineer video games, targeting PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo, with some success, and they’re now able to run natively on Linux and Windows.
Add that to the fact all 3 companies have seen massive declines in sales, and hardware costs increasing quite dramatically, this may be the end of the line for the console wars.
Interestingly, Sony released some of their exclusives on PC a few years ago and they sold extremely well. So what did Sony do? Announce that no more exclusives will port to PC. Nice work, guys!
No one hates Adobe more than their paying customers. I hope everyone involved in the move to subscriptions, including the gross cancellation fees, know that they killed the company.
The backlash against vibecoded decomps and using a lot of compute for unimpactful projects was met with the counterargument "why can't you vibecode something useful like Photoshop instead?"
No, the backlash was because vibecoded decomps were trash, incomplete, and quickly abandoned once the attention rush wore off. You'll never guess what's happening to these!
Just recently there was a massive kerfuffle in the Minecraft modding community because a mod called Thaumcraft was recreated after it was effectively abandoned for 7 years. The mod's management team threatened copyright legal action.
It's extremely ironic seeing the modding community, which generally play fast and loose with IP rights, all of a sudden care about them when AI made modding trivial.
You can see some of the community responses here, it's hilarious.
It's basically "you can't make a mod inspired by the other mod we're hugging the rights for"
Completely missing the part they didn't ask for permission to mod the base game either..... and that Thaumcraft (the original mod) had assets consisting mostly of random images copied off google images. Yes you can't make that up. "You can't steal what I've rightfully stolen!"
I am actually quite curious if the original Thaumcraft mod author Azanor is on HN. I know a lot of the original generation of Minecraft modders (pre twitch, mostly YouTube days, Minecraft modding changed a lot post twitch) are fairly senior software engineers (most famous one is probably Sethbling, though he didn't really do modding).
There's a "Direwolf20" on hacker news too but that user has nothing to do with the famous Minecraft modder afaik.
I mean, the REAL backlash they got was "So, are you going to abandon this on in 72 hours too?" at which point, once again, without fail, they do.
You'll find drama for decomps of games with active projects. Which is why the DK64 styled all over the AI Slop. You find zero drama for those with not. You may find some with translation projects, but most people already figured out you can just give them 0 attention, there are live translation tools (that you can run on dual screen devices even).
And then there's morons like the PSO on the browser who tried adding merch links and got C&D'd within 12 hours.
I'm sorry but isn't this the whole point of free and open source software? We have been saying this for decades.
Maintainers, you don't owe anyone anything. Put your own life and mental health first. Things like we specifically disclaim all liability and that this software is available free of cost with no assumption of ongoing support etc.
The clones may not be perfect, but now I'll be assuming every hate post is damage control. That's what happens when the arguments are so hyperbolic; Calling AI users pedophiles without proof is a surefire way to make me doubt YOUR argument because of how exhaustingly cliched and predictable it has become to do so.
Oh poor Adobe. They wanted to use AI to save money on employees and make charts go up, but it's being used against them instead. They opened Pandora's box but thought the evils contained within would only affect what they believe are lower castes. They forgot humanity can tame beasts. And they specially forgot nerds exist.
"You are supposed to be subjugated! You are all supposed to be stupid and inferior! Why are you building houses with the stones we throw at you???"
When in doubt accuse anyone hurting your corporate profits of being a terrorist and/or paedophile. It's the Epstein class's favourite tactic, but every accusation from them is a confession.
Here are 2 quotes, which give you a pretty good idea about the whole article:
> They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
and
> Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows.
Heh - good choices. Seems like a poorly reasoned article then.
Accepting the premise of 2000$ spent (I doubt it), the author completely forgets that the collectively saved amount far exceeds the 200$ of a single subscription.
Anyway, if I worked at Adobe, or any company with roughly the same business model, I definitely would feel nervous about now. And I still feel sympathy for the devs. But let’s be honest, Adobe principally benefits its shareholders and other dead weight, not so much the developers.
There’s no way you or anyone else actually thinks that first point is rational right?
That price comparison makes no sense. Users aren’t each paying $2,000 to use the alternative. It’s already paid and now free to use. People can chip in some money and time to contribute and build off the existing work to improve it.
How could anyone read that and think that’s a good point?
I suspect most of these projects are started by people who get Claude Code at work, and just want to make sure that they spend all of their tokens before the weekly reset. In that case, cost is not relevant.
The project the blog post is attacking is Artcraft, spearheaded by HN's most vocal AI evangelist zealot. He's stated that he's financing the thing with the revenue from his $3, no $4, no $5M/year AI image generator.
Which is why the salient part of the post is "Unless your intention is just to generate headlines and promote an AI business." Because that's exactly what this is. A cynical scheme to draw attention to his commercial services.
I think we’re going to see a lot of this clueless cloning across the board. Photoshop and the like are very visible targets because they’re popular and the “outcomes” of this cloning are flashy and trigger endorphin responses in people who think “it’s just about coloring pixels, how hard can it be?” But as the article says the core engine is flabbergastingly efficient - I ran Photoshop on early Macs, and boy, was it devastatingly efficient for the hardware at the time.
That is nowhere on these projects’ roadmap, which is kind of sad because AI is pretty decent at targeted optimizations, if you know what to ask for and how to guide it.
Despite some of the takes in here, this stuff widens adobes moat by disincentivizing thoughtful innovation and driving out any real competition from below. The only type of people that will be interested in this crapware are the types that were probably willing to pirate it to begin with.
That is nowhere on these projects’ roadmap, which is kind of sad because AI is pretty decent at targeted optimizations, if you know what to ask for and how to guide it.
Exactly. The argument against these clones not doing X or not doing it well is simply "then tell the AI to do X and/or optimise it."
To be fair, I think the kind of person who is going to use the vibecoded clone is your average "I need Photoshop for this one thing"[0] user who isn't working on 100MP images or multi-layer shenanigans or, really, any of the things you'd run into Photoshop's engine efficiencies with.
[0] The purported clones all have deficiencies in one area or another.
To answer the question regarding bloat in adobe software just look at the creative cloud app and how you have to use it to update and install individual applications. Look at the Adobe Genuine Software service that runs on Windows. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What a sad rant... I am glad that there is vibecoded Photoshop alternative. I used it this weekend to correct some photos for printing and it did well. I am not an artist or professional, I just want to have my "photoshoppy" software to do regular stuff I learned when I first launched Photoshop 6.0. That is what I want, to not change the way I work I learned in the beginning.
This is a fair point, and pretty much the only one that holds any merit in this weird rant. I hope we'll find a way to economically reward excellence as we move into this new era
Yes, building it is basically the marginal token cost now. Maintaining it too. Security testing it too. So you're just down to infrastructure, which, not surprisingly, is also collapsing quickly
If I was Adobe's marketing department, I wouldn't be sure whether to run around quietly seeding such stories, or be completely silent and hope people won't notice the moat is getting thinner.
Even aside from the calling the developers pedophiles, the author seems to just throw a bunch of arguments at the wall, hoping some will land. But there seems to be a deep contradiction: if it's true that the projects all suck and are very far from being useful, then Adobe has nothing to worry about. People only use counterfeits willingly when they're a good replacement for the real thing. You can barely call them a clone if they haven't copied the real differentiators.
Personally, I think what the companies really have to worry about isn't these sorts of clones, but that it won't be long before everyone can just spin up some software that does the 5% of the job that they actually care about. Software gets clunky and bloated because every new feature appeals to somebody; it's just not always the same somebody. So there's a ratchet effect where you can never remove a feature because someone will always complain.
Isn't a big issue with Adobe that competitor apps don't stand a chance because they won't have the file saved/load support for current and past file formats that designers are forced to rely on?
Designers can't risk even pixel sized issues with the specifics of the above for daily project work, so it forces them to use Photoshop or InDesign with expensive cloud subscription plans to work with other designers and prevents them from using unsupported platforms like Linux. This kind of vendor lock-in has held back competition and created resentment for a long time.
The example of the sluggish brush rendering isn't going to be hard to fix, but network effects and 100% file support is what has made it almost impossible to compete with Adobe despite many honest attempts to make better apps.
> "The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera"
I knocked up some quick code for drawing on an image a while back as part of a work project, but I've never actually checked how well it works on gigantic images. It calculates the bounding box of your stroke every frame, and uses an SDF-based system to calculate the pixels of the stroke (so if you draw quickly, it will correctly join up the points). I didn't focus too heavily on performance, other than making sure it was good enough to not slow down the app, but since its speed only depends on how much you're actually drawing per frame, rather than the size of the canvas, I'd imagine it would hold up reasonably on gigantic images?
Yeah, I think the article writer is too confident in the idea that these issues won't be solved:
"Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job."
I don't understand how this argument makes sense. Sure, yes, the vibecoded Photoshop clone is three human years old; I agree. It would probably take me about three years to build something like this. But that doesn't change the fact that its development velocity is, and will remain, "three human years in a few LLM days."
So if the brushes are a pain point, tell the LLM to focus on brush performance and let it run for a few hours.
> One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
Too insane of a thing to throw in as a generalizing aside that isn't expanded upon. I have to conclude the author is upset about the current situation to the point of unhinged
I think it's a sign that their reality distortion field is starting to break down and their coping mechanism is to resort to more and more aggressive personal attacks and slander.
for casual users, there are already open source alternatives to Adobe products. For professionals who can afford to pay the subscription, there is value in knowing a proper company is behind that subscription. This vibe coded clones, unless someone truly spends effort in making a good and working app, are pointless. But you can't get UX from screenshot. Proper UX is still the domain of humans, because this generation of AIs can't feel.
Affinity went free last year and I have been giving it a go. My main struggle is it's just so hard to find guides on how to do things, and LLMs hallucinate like crazy when you ask them how to do things in programs if they can't find a reddit post to wholesale rip it from. While this project would let me just look up photoshop guides and achieve the same result since the UI is the same.
> for casual users, there are already open source alternatives to Adobe products.
We need a better word than "alternatives" because they are, on the whole, partial-alternatives at best. Whether it's missing features (and I'm not talking about the esoteric here; I'm talking basic things like "expand the selection", etc.) or mind-boggling UX problems, they're all slightly deficient compared with Photoshop.
The question is why you need the UX if models just deal with the software to get you what you want done without complaining - even if, perhaps especially if you’re a knowledgeable pro.
> Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses
Sure, but this doesn't exculpate them entirely. Adobe is where it is entirely because not enough people said 'no' as everything progressively got worse. If you find yourself thinking "well, I'm not going to risk my job just to go against my boss" then you're a small part of the problem, and I think those on the receiving end will understandably feel a bit shitty about you. You may not be an evil person, and in all other areas of life you may be a stand up citizen, but there needs to be some acceptance of responsibility. The road to hell is paved by those who look the other way.
I just vibe coded over the weekend $5 in deepseek tokens a trading console that has most of the things that I wanted but would have had to get a subscription for $100-300 monthly. I think software and software as a service companies are going to be hurt bad in the next few years.
Some valid points but I'm not sure if I agree with the brush engine point. I don't think it's the most important feature of Photoshop to many, so not making that one right first is not that surprising.
Making a good brush engine is indeed a very hard problem, especially when you have undo history, high res canvases, layers, zoom etc. I just don't see it of such importance
My team are and the full Adobe plans and for our use cases it's also not important. We do have a few workflows that dive deeper into niche tools only Photoshop has though, but I can see competitors making streamlined apps for specific use cases that can compete. It's actually kind of tempting to see if I can get something done over a couple nweekends and see if it'd be usable
I tried the most popular Photoshop clone recently. I closed and uninstalled it when it turned out that paste was causing three pastes. This software might be great in the future, but not this year. Not without a LOT of looping through human testing.
I wish major software like office and adobe (photoshop) didn't come with mandatory subscriptions, cloud integration, and AI. The most ironic outcome would be a good-enough AI-generated photoshop clone that doesn't have user-facing AI integration.
> A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old.
I think that's an interesting way to put the quality of vibe coded apps in perspective. A human developing a software will definitely notice the obvious issues if they are using it in much less time frame (6 weeks? 6 months?).
It feels like the waterfall style software projects which would be just built for years and when delivered turn out to be mostly useless.
The way this stuff is built is just incomparable. A human developer would build one feature at a time and release it when it's reasonably working and complete. These vibecoded projects start on everything and then people discover and report the issues to feed back in to the AI to refine.
The whole project is run like this. The artcraft project has 12 programs currently and none of them are quite ready for serious use but they are all refining rapidly. Bugs reported by real users are getting fixed in days.
Isn't it a poor perspective? We all know AI assisted coding needs review, practical testing and refining, especially for functionality in different use cases that cannot be easily verified by a model. Practical testing and verification remains a bottleneck even in automated systems
I mean imagine if a (expert) human was just writing code for 3 years straight without doing any of the other things you mention like review/testing/refining. I would expect that app also to be performing/behaving poorly. So kind of like a worse waterfall sdlc. So perspective is okay ?
When the digital cameras first came out, they were pretty terrible. Low res, bad colors, small memory. By all rights the consumer should have taken a look at the difference in quality between film and digital and stayed with film. Certainly, if as was imagined in some circles, if the average consumer was the kind of connoisseur that valued quality photographs.
The average consumer was not the kind of connoisseur that valued quality photographs. The average consumer wanted something cheap and simple that allowed them to take photos and skip bringing them in to the shop to have them developed. The average consumer wanted to have their photos on their computer without scanning them, and didn’t want to pay a Polaroid premium for instant shots.
Over time digital cameras got better and better until the technology was subsumed into phones. Few people are unhappy about how it went.
This is how these things go. An inferior good is made, competes with the incumbent on cost and convenience, and is improved over time to become the dominant kind of good. This is the definition of disruption. The software industry, after decades of doing the disrupting, is now being disrupted.
The issue they will hit is that without a direct economic incentive and paying customers, there's zero perceived benefit for fixing bugs if you don't even share in the joy of the work. Thus you end up with a buggy, free version of Adobe's incredible product suite that tries to ride the hype/feature treadmill in perpetuity.
There's plenty of users bringing their own Claude subscriptions to fix bugs so it's not all a cost on the initial creator. The motivation is to have free open source high quality programs.
There's already a huge market of OSS products that are much more stable and closer to real feature parity to the Adobe suite. How have all those users bringing their own Claude subscriptions worked out there?
Author's argument about lower quality of vibecoded software (the brush example) is just a matter of iteration. We can't assume they won't catch up at some point
>If you’re trying to build a Photoshop competitor in the year 2026 you should be building the engine first and then adding all the advanced features on top later, not the other way around. Unless your intention is just to generate headlines and promote an AI business.
I really wish more people realized this was Artcraft's goal.
It's not that you can build a photoshop clone by spending 2000$ in claude API credits. Adobe is going to do a better job than you.
What works out easier is that you can build and maintain a version that only has the features you need, with a ~20$ subscription of any of the good AI coding harnesses.
I have done this for my photography workflow and discontinued my Adobe subscription.
The basic photo editing tools were set in stone decades ago. Adobe has spent years tweaking things 1% of their userbase wants like 3D manipulation. Once somebody makes a basic clone which does the main basic tools well then its game over for Photoshop.
Open source raw processing libraries are pretty great.
I got AI to build me a Qt frontend that has the Lightroom features I actually use. The result is significantly snappier than Lightroom. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.
And some layer and masking stuff from photoshop. Photography related work doesn’t need heavier weight photoshop features in general.
In a couple weeks this ‘pirated’ software (not sure what’s pirated about it btw) will have good brush performance and will be handling 100 megapixel images easily precisely because of this post.
I for one am not grieving the saas rent seeking model, but as most folks here (I assume) my livelihood depends on it since that’s how my employer finances my salary. So yes, I’m concerned, but also am aware that technology cannibalizing technology is a thing and we have to move on and make ourselves useful in this new world.
This doesnt result in lawsuits because nothing illegal is going on. There have been genuine Photoshop clones on sale for years (see Serif Affinity) so just because they are vibe coded now doesnt make them illegal.
Per-token Inference is likely profitable (the news was before recent price cuts that may make the numbers less valid), but subscriptions if fully utilized are 100x value, and the profit margins aren't that high.
Yes, vibe the coded software is shit. But Adobe is a terrible company. So hopefully we will reach a point where these organisations can't afford to be so horrible.
i can imagine reading something similar about Linux 30 years ago.
> oh nooooo, what's going to happen to all the Unix vendors with the systems they sell for thousands of dollars?
adobe has fucked their customers for over a decade, is time they're fucked back. I won't miss them. Hope their employees can find jobs at better companies quickly.
also:
>They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
very smart economics, because they do it once and get to have it forever, for free, for everyone. it's charity.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people working on these clones aren't focused on making smart economic decisions for themselves with these projects.
"You failed at the thing you didn't try to do" isn't a strong point.
autoresearch can solve a lot of these issues and i am sure people are usually heavily heavily subsidized subscriptions
article seems very salty and im not sure why
also the economics is you open source something and its saves every one money and opens up more cross compile support, i bet this will scare companies to support linux more properly before linux users just start getting very good at cloning
The delusion of Imaginary Property is evaporating faster than ever. Those who try to desperately cling to it are going to lose.
It ruins the incentive to create
Only to those who believe in the delusion, that somehow everything they create is absolutely original, without realising how they gained that knowledge to create in the first place.
Meanwhile remixing (in the form of fanfiction, mash-ups, etc.) has always been part of human culture, and now AI is boosting that like never before.
We are effectively approaching post-scarcity in software and entertainment.
Yes, right now these vibe coded apps are not alternative, but the fact is that 6 months ago it would take years for a single person to build them. Who knows what will be available in the next 6 months?
We all need to come to terms with the fact that the landscape has changed and the implemetation is no longer a value.
I vibed and fixed all the stuff we use from Adobe. We don't use 8k*8k hasselblad whatnot; we use a few things that were terrible in open source and now are trivially replaced in a few weeks (yes yes the first vibe thing works but is not production ready; after a few weeks of daily fixes, it's good enough to cancel the subscription eeeh terminate the card you did the subscription on). Not everyone needs everything...
I've been vibe coding plenty of apps for personal use, especially to replace free Google stuff; I'm doing it for lack of trust and control those apps give me. Even more would apply to Adobe stuff.
Innovation in Adobe products? Really? I mean, really? Are you serious?
And the main argument is performance on high resolution?
This is happening across a lot of different industry types ..
In the music technology world, people are having an absolute field day vibe-coding alternative firmwares for devices which have long since been abandoned by their manufacturers.. and it is GREAT!
There is a very exciting revolution happening with the M-VAVE FM1 synthesizer, which has been reverse engineered - and now folks are producing firmwares for it, at a rate of 1 or 2 each week - which radically extend its functionality and give it features NONE of us expected.
For a $60 device, this is phenomenal - and it is fair to say that the M-VAVE FM1 is probably the hottest ticket item in the music technology world, today - putting a lot of manufacturers on notice that either they properly support their locked down, closed-garden products, or the users will.
Truly phenomenal.
And, there are many more such examples: a new firmware for the Arturia MicroFreak, for example, which adds more and more synth engines not considered by Arturia for inclusion (for whatever arbitrary reasons), but definitely shoe-horn'ed into place by MicroFreak users. See also the quite revolution happening around Behringers' firmwares, which is teaching them quite the lesson. I predict either Big Music Tech is going to embrace this trend - and start releasing devkits and SDK's for their systems - or they are going to go the other way and start encrypting their firmware such that AI kiddies can't gain access .. but for the decades of stuff thats already out there, its fair game.
(Details here for those interested, in general, in how music tech is being hacked into oblivion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDmAvZKtqq8 .. and for details about the FM1 and all the amazing firmwares being produced for it by vibecoders, reverse engineers, and hackers alike, check https://old.reddit.com/r/MVaveFM1/)
>>The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera
It's just a matter of time, AI will build the PS engine better. (in rust obviously)
The tone is angry but understandably so. The labour, creativity and innovation of millions is being stolen and then belittled by grifters shilling slop. Art, design, math, music, software, there's nothing they won't claim they can now copyright-launder and somehow magically render obsolete. But look at any of it and it's never more than the simulacrum of real work. It always looks like the real thing, particularly to the untrained eye but it's always a tissue-paper of stolen work and half-assed, half-working, sloppy output. The prompters are lazy and so are the models.
These are powerful, interesting tools but the money, the hype and the grift is just intollerable, a pox on it all. If you're a professional you cannot ignore or avoid it, but you can push towards a future where the commodification of it - open models, open weights, open hardware - turns it into a low-margin overlay on real intellectual work and the hype/grift machine can move on to whatever intellectually bankrupt boondoggle they find next.
Guess, that cruising phase of a ton of careers is cut short. Its back to the trenches, to work and shovel till death comes for us keyboard slaves. If some singularity demon can undo your moat, you never had one to begin with.
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction:
A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.
At the moment they seem to be cloning the UI and functionality. That is serious enough of a threat but it has its limits, particularly with old file formats like PSD or old MS Office that were a direct 1:1 mapping of C memory structs onto the disk.
But that won't be the case for too long I think. AI is nowadays capable of doing decompilation based on prior knowledge and educated guesswork - it isn't much of a stretch to assume that runtime code decryption / obfuscation will fall too. When humans can do it (see e.g. extremely talented people like the infamous Empress), AI will be able to as well.
It's quite nauseating to read through such sycophantic defense of a pretty evil entity like Adobe, but what does this even mean:
> One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do)
"Vibe coders" as a group have this issue? Author might benefit from some therapy sessions.
I mean this crap will die hopefully die off when they get priced out of the needed tokens and their customers realise that there’s a limit to how many times you can write “Claude fix this bug plz” before the “devs” actually need to wade into some real, and at the scale of a vibed up PS clone, extremely confusing engineering.
The entire reason you're seeing a lot of more ambitious reverse-engineering/decomp projects as of late is due to Claude Opus 5.5, which is cheaper than models have been over the past year, in addition to being smarter.
> And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
> Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger.
I mean okay vibe coded photoshop clones is one thing but arguing your enemies are pedos and you're good guys that deserve all the gratitude in the world is not a great way to make an argument.
There are many good valid points in the whole insanity of the whole trend imo but this article drifts a LOT.
OP isn't just making a straw man argument, they're making the entire straw family.
> Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job.
I legitimately cannot parse the logic behind this argument.
I see it like this: because greenfield coding is strong with AI, but improving/large rewriting an existing codebase is getting progressively harder and worse, if you don't get the architecture right in the first try, improve them in later rounds will be very hard,if not futile. Thus the poor performance is not a typical day 1 problem as with human coding, but a pestilence.
It’s really badly put but I thiiiink they’re trying to say that due to the pace you can work with AI, you can have something technically complex but badly engineered quickly. Like three years of bad engineering in an afternoon? Or something? It’s still bad as even three months of bad engineering would normally contain far more foresight than a vibe coded weekend nonsense project
The article is strangely supportive of Adobe, far beyond a normal person's sense of ridicule.
Software development is about revenue, but specifically Adobe's revenue:
> Automated or semi-automated cloning to steal revenue away from developers
Pay us, don't innovate:
> They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
> Commercial apps innovate and lead. Open source apps like Blender follow the lead. Innovation costs a lot of money.
> Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger.
Why do people hate Adobe more than other companies? What's the difference? Only sensitive insiders would pretend to ignore decades of enshittification.
> Clip Paint Studio, Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, btw, are all subscription applications. But because those apps aren’t in demand by pirates Autodesk has not experienced the hate and bullying campaigns that Adobe has received.
People noticed the "underage children", but defending Adobe customer support is even more ridiculous:
> And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
I'm not a Photoshop user, but I was a GIMP user since my Linux years, and recently I've vibe-coded my own alternative. Why?
Easy, I wanted a middle-ground thing. Gimp, especially in Mac, is riddled with bugs, and it's a very heavy tool. The default Apple preview thing is okay for a single rotation or overlaying text, but not for other simple transformations. I wanted something in the middle.
I'm browsing my photo library, see a crooked image, quick uncrook it with a couple of clicks. I'm def not a "pro", so I don't care about 8k x 8k images or similar. Gimp is too heavy for this workflow, and the default mac app too light. I also prefer it to be offline, so I coded my own alternative.
I only got like 10~20% there few years ago coding by hand, even though I spent something like 1.5~2 weeks on it. I basically built the automated organization and visualization part (datetime extraction, adding tags, removing duplicates, thumbnails, etc), but none of the transformation tools. Now, thanks to LLMs, I've been able to build most of the things I wanted and meaningfully more in a couple of days, _inluding_ processing and editing videos, as well as these for images: perspective cropping, normal cropping, contrast, saturation, resizing, format conversion, etc:
https://x.com/francisco_io/status/2109555827304489202
I’d usually follow that logic that using AI models(that basically trained on everything it could get hands on without regard for people’s labor and effort) to steal someone’s right to get paid for their effort. But, this is Adobe we are talking about…
1. Nobody asked them to bundle PhotoShop with all the cloud features and force it down their user’s throat.. Adobe Photoshop as a tool could easily be a one-time paid per version software. Want assets and things only possible in the cloud? Here is an optional cloud feature that costs $x should be the logical default.
Force your users to pay for stuff they didn’t ask for and lock them them in for years? It feels morally justified that they get wrecked by AI models replicating their tool. If they are legitimately that good that one needs their Cloud justified content, perhaps they will still pay for Adobe. But, that’s all they are entitled to at this point.
Adobe are also training their own AI on everyone's work, so they have zero high ground here.
To understand hate against Adobe one have to experience attempt to stop Adobe subscription from renewing. This is truly life-changing experience.
This article reads to me like that "leave the multibillion dollar company alone" meme
> Yet despite this not one of these vibe coded projects has been able to create a brush engine that matches Photoshop’s brush engine.
The article author is brush hurt over this. Oddly specific.
I would not brush them off like this though, maybe they are the dev working on photoshop's brush, or brush is just the most basic tool in such software that it makes an easy comparison.
The person is literally that meme. Quotes from their other posts:
> They are pretending to be angry at big companies because they think it will make them look heroic and noble.
> So when the angry mobs online tell us that we must irrationally hate a race, nation, party or corporation - well I am not joining that movement.
This, and also as an amateur once-in-a-while user of 2 apps, I don't get why I have to pay the same price as professionals using 5 or more apps every day.
There's a lot of comments about how these projects could never be used seriously, but I don't use these programs seriously. I take photos for fun and I make posters for events. I'll happily take the vibecoded lightroom and photoshop for free and it runs on Linux natively.
For anyone in this situation - first upgrade your subscription to a different tier, wait a day for the account to reflect you are on a new test, then you cancel with the 7 day right to cancel. That way you avoid early cancellation fees
This feels like it is a brilliant loop hole, but knowing adobe there is a 20% chance that this backfires and you are now stuck with a higher tier of billing for a minimum of one more year.
This. I had to create a temporary card with my banking app (Monzo), then I could switch out the payment method on my adobe account. Then I could cancel the temp card and then finally Adobe can die whilst trying to charge my cancelled card. They wanted me to pay £80 to cancel, I’d had the account for 10 years so no idea what the cancellation related to.
They charged me $60 to stop paying them money.
Does the country you live in not have consumer protection laws?
Read this with Saul Goodman voice
I had to terminate the card… it was honestly easier, they have even been fined over their practices.
I've told this story before but I had to tell their scum support that I had cancer before they'd cancel my account. They just flat out refused. It was almost impressive in a way.
I hear that groups are using AI to reverse-engineer video games, targeting PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo, with some success, and they’re now able to run natively on Linux and Windows.
Add that to the fact all 3 companies have seen massive declines in sales, and hardware costs increasing quite dramatically, this may be the end of the line for the console wars.
Interestingly, Sony released some of their exclusives on PC a few years ago and they sold extremely well. So what did Sony do? Announce that no more exclusives will port to PC. Nice work, guys!
No one hates Adobe more than their paying customers. I hope everyone involved in the move to subscriptions, including the gross cancellation fees, know that they killed the company.
The backlash against vibecoded decomps and using a lot of compute for unimpactful projects was met with the counterargument "why can't you vibecode something useful like Photoshop instead?"
When they did vibecode Photoshop, well...
No, the backlash was because vibecoded decomps were trash, incomplete, and quickly abandoned once the attention rush wore off. You'll never guess what's happening to these!
Take a look at the commit cadence of the Photoshop-clone-that-must-not-be-named: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/commits/main/
Irrelevant.
Just recently there was a massive kerfuffle in the Minecraft modding community because a mod called Thaumcraft was recreated after it was effectively abandoned for 7 years. The mod's management team threatened copyright legal action.
It's extremely ironic seeing the modding community, which generally play fast and loose with IP rights, all of a sudden care about them when AI made modding trivial.
You can see some of the community responses here, it's hilarious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x2gu7j/so_wh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x3b5pk/looki...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x0p9ap/when_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x1q6bx/from_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x1mqb2/the_c...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x3v6qw/what_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x3kw5r/glad_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x2mx4w/reaso...
I have not seen such delicious drama in the Minecraft modding world in years ever since the Forge/Neoforge schism.
Reminds me of Sayre’s law[1], about the politics being vicious because the stakes are so small.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
I didn't realize that Wadler's Law is just a reformulation of Sayre's Law!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Related_prin... directly referenced.
These are hilarious thanks for the rundown
Was that specific mod team playing fast and loose with IP rights? If not, then it’s irrelevant
It's basically "you can't make a mod inspired by the other mod we're hugging the rights for"
Completely missing the part they didn't ask for permission to mod the base game either..... and that Thaumcraft (the original mod) had assets consisting mostly of random images copied off google images. Yes you can't make that up. "You can't steal what I've rightfully stolen!"
I am actually quite curious if the original Thaumcraft mod author Azanor is on HN. I know a lot of the original generation of Minecraft modders (pre twitch, mostly YouTube days, Minecraft modding changed a lot post twitch) are fairly senior software engineers (most famous one is probably Sethbling, though he didn't really do modding).
There's a "Direwolf20" on hacker news too but that user has nothing to do with the famous Minecraft modder afaik.
I mean, the REAL backlash they got was "So, are you going to abandon this on in 72 hours too?" at which point, once again, without fail, they do.
You'll find drama for decomps of games with active projects. Which is why the DK64 styled all over the AI Slop. You find zero drama for those with not. You may find some with translation projects, but most people already figured out you can just give them 0 attention, there are live translation tools (that you can run on dual screen devices even).
And then there's morons like the PSO on the browser who tried adding merch links and got C&D'd within 12 hours.
I'm sorry but isn't this the whole point of free and open source software? We have been saying this for decades.
Maintainers, you don't owe anyone anything. Put your own life and mental health first. Things like we specifically disclaim all liability and that this software is available free of cost with no assumption of ongoing support etc.
> they’re now able to run natively on Linux and Windows.
Well, no. I think a couple of very basic ps5 2d games are playable so far.
> Add that to the fact all 3 companies have seen massive declines in sales
What are you basing that on? That doesn’t seem to be true at all
Here you go: https://www.polygon.com/game-console-sales-down-ai-component...
For 2026 YTD ending August, Xbox hardware unit sales are down 33% versus a year ago in the US, while PlayStation hardware units are 25% lower.
And: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/nintendo-switch-2-uni...
Nintendo Switch 2 hardware sales are down 34.4 percent year-on-year.
Microsoft are secretly trying to offload Xbox and want out of the gaming business. It will happen soon.
Looks like a nerve was struck.
The clones may not be perfect, but now I'll be assuming every hate post is damage control. That's what happens when the arguments are so hyperbolic; Calling AI users pedophiles without proof is a surefire way to make me doubt YOUR argument because of how exhaustingly cliched and predictable it has become to do so.
Oh poor Adobe. They wanted to use AI to save money on employees and make charts go up, but it's being used against them instead. They opened Pandora's box but thought the evils contained within would only affect what they believe are lower castes. They forgot humanity can tame beasts. And they specially forgot nerds exist.
"You are supposed to be subjugated! You are all supposed to be stupid and inferior! Why are you building houses with the stones we throw at you???"
I am not crying any tears for them.
The “Vibe coders are paedophiles” bit caught me slightly off guard.
Felt like that undermined some of the more cogent points the article was making.
At least they're not using Grok to clone KidPix!
Yeah wtf was that. Came out of nowhere.
When in doubt accuse anyone hurting your corporate profits of being a terrorist and/or paedophile. It's the Epstein class's favourite tactic, but every accusation from them is a confession.
i mean discord has this rep. child predator Discord mods is a meme by now. and it's also true that it's the platform of choice for vibe coders.
but sure fully conflating them is a stretch...
Almost every AI project has a discord to build community, including OpenAI, Midjourney...
But think of the children! /s
Purely reasoned rant of vibe coded clones.
Here are 2 quotes, which give you a pretty good idea about the whole article:
> They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
and
> Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows.
Heh - good choices. Seems like a poorly reasoned article then.
Accepting the premise of 2000$ spent (I doubt it), the author completely forgets that the collectively saved amount far exceeds the 200$ of a single subscription.
Anyway, if I worked at Adobe, or any company with roughly the same business model, I definitely would feel nervous about now. And I still feel sympathy for the devs. But let’s be honest, Adobe principally benefits its shareholders and other dead weight, not so much the developers.
There’s no way you or anyone else actually thinks that first point is rational right?
That price comparison makes no sense. Users aren’t each paying $2,000 to use the alternative. It’s already paid and now free to use. People can chip in some money and time to contribute and build off the existing work to improve it.
How could anyone read that and think that’s a good point?
So Jensen was right and math is not needed any more ?
You know, like you can vibecode the thing once for a fixed price and then many people ca use it for free, for ever.
You forgot about "if you use discord your are a pedophile"
I suspect most of these projects are started by people who get Claude Code at work, and just want to make sure that they spend all of their tokens before the weekly reset. In that case, cost is not relevant.
The project the blog post is attacking is Artcraft, spearheaded by HN's most vocal AI evangelist zealot. He's stated that he's financing the thing with the revenue from his $3, no $4, no $5M/year AI image generator.
Which is why the salient part of the post is "Unless your intention is just to generate headlines and promote an AI business." Because that's exactly what this is. A cynical scheme to draw attention to his commercial services.
I think we’re going to see a lot of this clueless cloning across the board. Photoshop and the like are very visible targets because they’re popular and the “outcomes” of this cloning are flashy and trigger endorphin responses in people who think “it’s just about coloring pixels, how hard can it be?” But as the article says the core engine is flabbergastingly efficient - I ran Photoshop on early Macs, and boy, was it devastatingly efficient for the hardware at the time.
That is nowhere on these projects’ roadmap, which is kind of sad because AI is pretty decent at targeted optimizations, if you know what to ask for and how to guide it.
Despite some of the takes in here, this stuff widens adobes moat by disincentivizing thoughtful innovation and driving out any real competition from below. The only type of people that will be interested in this crapware are the types that were probably willing to pirate it to begin with.
That is nowhere on these projects’ roadmap, which is kind of sad because AI is pretty decent at targeted optimizations, if you know what to ask for and how to guide it.
Exactly. The argument against these clones not doing X or not doing it well is simply "then tell the AI to do X and/or optimise it."
This was my eye-opening moment regarding whether vibe-coded software can be efficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923
To be fair, I think the kind of person who is going to use the vibecoded clone is your average "I need Photoshop for this one thing"[0] user who isn't working on 100MP images or multi-layer shenanigans or, really, any of the things you'd run into Photoshop's engine efficiencies with.
[0] The purported clones all have deficiencies in one area or another.
To answer the question regarding bloat in adobe software just look at the creative cloud app and how you have to use it to update and install individual applications. Look at the Adobe Genuine Software service that runs on Windows. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
What a sad rant... I am glad that there is vibecoded Photoshop alternative. I used it this weekend to correct some photos for printing and it did well. I am not an artist or professional, I just want to have my "photoshoppy" software to do regular stuff I learned when I first launched Photoshop 6.0. That is what I want, to not change the way I work I learned in the beginning.
> vibe cloned piracy is a demotivating force. It ruins the incentive to create.
I also feel demotivated by these clones. It devalues the legitmate pursuit of building creative apps to compete with the current standards.
This is a fair point, and pretty much the only one that holds any merit in this weird rant. I hope we'll find a way to economically reward excellence as we move into this new era
LGTM (think this video captures the vibe well https://youtu.be/3TNpOD6bov8?is=X9kLvF9WyWHb-slu)
While I'm dubious of these clones, you cannot compare the price for renting the software and the price for building it
Yes, building it is basically the marginal token cost now. Maintaining it too. Security testing it too. So you're just down to infrastructure, which, not surprisingly, is also collapsing quickly
Security testing has still some challenges, as most public cloud models don't do it well.
If I was Adobe's marketing department, I wouldn't be sure whether to run around quietly seeding such stories, or be completely silent and hope people won't notice the moat is getting thinner.
Even aside from the calling the developers pedophiles, the author seems to just throw a bunch of arguments at the wall, hoping some will land. But there seems to be a deep contradiction: if it's true that the projects all suck and are very far from being useful, then Adobe has nothing to worry about. People only use counterfeits willingly when they're a good replacement for the real thing. You can barely call them a clone if they haven't copied the real differentiators.
Personally, I think what the companies really have to worry about isn't these sorts of clones, but that it won't be long before everyone can just spin up some software that does the 5% of the job that they actually care about. Software gets clunky and bloated because every new feature appeals to somebody; it's just not always the same somebody. So there's a ratchet effect where you can never remove a feature because someone will always complain.
> Adobe has nothing to worry about
I think you nailed it.
Isn't a big issue with Adobe that competitor apps don't stand a chance because they won't have the file saved/load support for current and past file formats that designers are forced to rely on?
Designers can't risk even pixel sized issues with the specifics of the above for daily project work, so it forces them to use Photoshop or InDesign with expensive cloud subscription plans to work with other designers and prevents them from using unsupported platforms like Linux. This kind of vendor lock-in has held back competition and created resentment for a long time.
The example of the sluggish brush rendering isn't going to be hard to fix, but network effects and 100% file support is what has made it almost impossible to compete with Adobe despite many honest attempts to make better apps.
> "The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera"
I knocked up some quick code for drawing on an image a while back as part of a work project, but I've never actually checked how well it works on gigantic images. It calculates the bounding box of your stroke every frame, and uses an SDF-based system to calculate the pixels of the stroke (so if you draw quickly, it will correctly join up the points). I didn't focus too heavily on performance, other than making sure it was good enough to not slow down the app, but since its speed only depends on how much you're actually drawing per frame, rather than the size of the canvas, I'd imagine it would hold up reasonably on gigantic images?
Nothing some auto research and a goal function can't solve....
Yeah, I think the article writer is too confident in the idea that these issues won't be solved:
"Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job."
I don't understand how this argument makes sense. Sure, yes, the vibecoded Photoshop clone is three human years old; I agree. It would probably take me about three years to build something like this. But that doesn't change the fact that its development velocity is, and will remain, "three human years in a few LLM days."
So if the brushes are a pain point, tell the LLM to focus on brush performance and let it run for a few hours.
Well I did it with actual research, and the goal was "make something that works"
> One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
Too insane of a thing to throw in as a generalizing aside that isn't expanded upon. I have to conclude the author is upset about the current situation to the point of unhinged
I think it's a sign that their reality distortion field is starting to break down and their coping mechanism is to resort to more and more aggressive personal attacks and slander.
for casual users, there are already open source alternatives to Adobe products. For professionals who can afford to pay the subscription, there is value in knowing a proper company is behind that subscription. This vibe coded clones, unless someone truly spends effort in making a good and working app, are pointless. But you can't get UX from screenshot. Proper UX is still the domain of humans, because this generation of AIs can't feel.
Affinity went free last year and I have been giving it a go. My main struggle is it's just so hard to find guides on how to do things, and LLMs hallucinate like crazy when you ask them how to do things in programs if they can't find a reddit post to wholesale rip it from. While this project would let me just look up photoshop guides and achieve the same result since the UI is the same.
> for casual users, there are already open source alternatives to Adobe products.
We need a better word than "alternatives" because they are, on the whole, partial-alternatives at best. Whether it's missing features (and I'm not talking about the esoteric here; I'm talking basic things like "expand the selection", etc.) or mind-boggling UX problems, they're all slightly deficient compared with Photoshop.
Which sucks.
The question is why you need the UX if models just deal with the software to get you what you want done without complaining - even if, perhaps especially if you’re a knowledgeable pro.
> Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses
Sure, but this doesn't exculpate them entirely. Adobe is where it is entirely because not enough people said 'no' as everything progressively got worse. If you find yourself thinking "well, I'm not going to risk my job just to go against my boss" then you're a small part of the problem, and I think those on the receiving end will understandably feel a bit shitty about you. You may not be an evil person, and in all other areas of life you may be a stand up citizen, but there needs to be some acceptance of responsibility. The road to hell is paved by those who look the other way.
I just vibe coded over the weekend $5 in deepseek tokens a trading console that has most of the things that I wanted but would have had to get a subscription for $100-300 monthly. I think software and software as a service companies are going to be hurt bad in the next few years.
Some valid points but I'm not sure if I agree with the brush engine point. I don't think it's the most important feature of Photoshop to many, so not making that one right first is not that surprising.
Making a good brush engine is indeed a very hard problem, especially when you have undo history, high res canvases, layers, zoom etc. I just don't see it of such importance
Which is why you aren't the audience of people that pay for Photoshop.
My team are and the full Adobe plans and for our use cases it's also not important. We do have a few workflows that dive deeper into niche tools only Photoshop has though, but I can see competitors making streamlined apps for specific use cases that can compete. It's actually kind of tempting to see if I can get something done over a couple nweekends and see if it'd be usable
The PhotoCraft repo already appears to have over 200 contributors.
I'd consider adding/improving the features directly there, unless a more streamlined alternative is the goal.
I wonder if the project only takes contributions that aim for parity with the Adobe software or also new features and improvements.
That's very superficial. I used to pay for Photoshop and I was very happy until they started with the subscription business.
I tried the most popular Photoshop clone recently. I closed and uninstalled it when it turned out that paste was causing three pastes. This software might be great in the future, but not this year. Not without a LOT of looping through human testing.
I wish major software like office and adobe (photoshop) didn't come with mandatory subscriptions, cloud integration, and AI. The most ironic outcome would be a good-enough AI-generated photoshop clone that doesn't have user-facing AI integration.
> A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old.
I think that's an interesting way to put the quality of vibe coded apps in perspective. A human developing a software will definitely notice the obvious issues if they are using it in much less time frame (6 weeks? 6 months?).
It feels like the waterfall style software projects which would be just built for years and when delivered turn out to be mostly useless.
The way this stuff is built is just incomparable. A human developer would build one feature at a time and release it when it's reasonably working and complete. These vibecoded projects start on everything and then people discover and report the issues to feed back in to the AI to refine.
The whole project is run like this. The artcraft project has 12 programs currently and none of them are quite ready for serious use but they are all refining rapidly. Bugs reported by real users are getting fixed in days.
Isn't it a poor perspective? We all know AI assisted coding needs review, practical testing and refining, especially for functionality in different use cases that cannot be easily verified by a model. Practical testing and verification remains a bottleneck even in automated systems
I mean imagine if a (expert) human was just writing code for 3 years straight without doing any of the other things you mention like review/testing/refining. I would expect that app also to be performing/behaving poorly. So kind of like a worse waterfall sdlc. So perspective is okay ?
Ah I think I misunderstood you! We agree
I've also made a clone, except its purpose is for teaching: a TinyPhotoshop.ml in OCaml where the essence of Photoshop is reduced to a few thousand lines of readable code, https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/apps/#graphics
When the digital cameras first came out, they were pretty terrible. Low res, bad colors, small memory. By all rights the consumer should have taken a look at the difference in quality between film and digital and stayed with film. Certainly, if as was imagined in some circles, if the average consumer was the kind of connoisseur that valued quality photographs.
The average consumer was not the kind of connoisseur that valued quality photographs. The average consumer wanted something cheap and simple that allowed them to take photos and skip bringing them in to the shop to have them developed. The average consumer wanted to have their photos on their computer without scanning them, and didn’t want to pay a Polaroid premium for instant shots.
Over time digital cameras got better and better until the technology was subsumed into phones. Few people are unhappy about how it went.
This is how these things go. An inferior good is made, competes with the incumbent on cost and convenience, and is improved over time to become the dominant kind of good. This is the definition of disruption. The software industry, after decades of doing the disrupting, is now being disrupted.
The consumer will be happy about it.
Zero, zilch, nadda chance that these attention seekers with zero to add will be around long enough to improve this crapware over the medium term.
Maybe not, but after some time somebody with a brain and some decent coding skills will spend the time to make a good clone and then its game over.
If you look at the PhotoCraft repo, they seem to have over 200 contributors and a Discord community of 70k users.
And if I recall correctly the main author is running a company that builds this.
Sure, these stats might be exaggerated and a lot of the attention might be temporary.
But there seems to be a large community around this effort that could make long term maintenance more likely.
The issue they will hit is that without a direct economic incentive and paying customers, there's zero perceived benefit for fixing bugs if you don't even share in the joy of the work. Thus you end up with a buggy, free version of Adobe's incredible product suite that tries to ride the hype/feature treadmill in perpetuity.
There's plenty of users bringing their own Claude subscriptions to fix bugs so it's not all a cost on the initial creator. The motivation is to have free open source high quality programs.
There's already a huge market of OSS products that are much more stable and closer to real feature parity to the Adobe suite. How have all those users bringing their own Claude subscriptions worked out there?
I can hear the desperation in your voice.
Author's argument about lower quality of vibecoded software (the brush example) is just a matter of iteration. We can't assume they won't catch up at some point
I have just commented the same thing without reading yours first.
>If you’re trying to build a Photoshop competitor in the year 2026 you should be building the engine first and then adding all the advanced features on top later, not the other way around. Unless your intention is just to generate headlines and promote an AI business.
I really wish more people realized this was Artcraft's goal.
People are really missing the point here.
It's not that you can build a photoshop clone by spending 2000$ in claude API credits. Adobe is going to do a better job than you.
What works out easier is that you can build and maintain a version that only has the features you need, with a ~20$ subscription of any of the good AI coding harnesses.
I have done this for my photography workflow and discontinued my Adobe subscription.
The basic photo editing tools were set in stone decades ago. Adobe has spent years tweaking things 1% of their userbase wants like 3D manipulation. Once somebody makes a basic clone which does the main basic tools well then its game over for Photoshop.
hi there, can you share wdym? i'm very interested on creating such a workflow for my photography and get rid of adobe
Open source raw processing libraries are pretty great.
I got AI to build me a Qt frontend that has the Lightroom features I actually use. The result is significantly snappier than Lightroom. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.
And some layer and masking stuff from photoshop. Photography related work doesn’t need heavier weight photoshop features in general.
It’s grief.
In a couple weeks this ‘pirated’ software (not sure what’s pirated about it btw) will have good brush performance and will be handling 100 megapixel images easily precisely because of this post.
I for one am not grieving the saas rent seeking model, but as most folks here (I assume) my livelihood depends on it since that’s how my employer finances my salary. So yes, I’m concerned, but also am aware that technology cannibalizing technology is a thing and we have to move on and make ourselves useful in this new world.
So what would immediately result in lawsuits just a few years ago, is now simply condoned? My Overton windometer went off the charts.
This doesnt result in lawsuits because nothing illegal is going on. There have been genuine Photoshop clones on sale for years (see Serif Affinity) so just because they are vibe coded now doesnt make them illegal.
Ah, the moral high ground of those who are supposedly not vibe-coding themselves... speak for yourself
> The amount they are spending on tokens must be over $50,000 in the last two weeks.
Thing is, Claude tokens are subsidized, to the tune of 50x. You can’t judge by API pricing.
Do you have a source on that? I thought inference was highly profitable. Are you saying AWS is subsidizing Bedrock and incurring heavy losses?
No, I’m saying subscription tokens are heavily subsidized compared to API pricing, which is what TFA talks about. Quote:
> The amount being spent in AI tokens (API costs) is in the thousands of dollars per project.
Source is https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscription... which claims you can use up to ~$12.5k on a $200 Claude sub.
Per-token Inference is likely profitable (the news was before recent price cuts that may make the numbers less valid), but subscriptions if fully utilized are 100x value, and the profit margins aren't that high.
Ok, but subscriptions only work for individuals, not for companies, right?
Works for companies up to 150 seats.
Yes, vibe the coded software is shit. But Adobe is a terrible company. So hopefully we will reach a point where these organisations can't afford to be so horrible.
i can imagine reading something similar about Linux 30 years ago.
> oh nooooo, what's going to happen to all the Unix vendors with the systems they sell for thousands of dollars?
adobe has fucked their customers for over a decade, is time they're fucked back. I won't miss them. Hope their employees can find jobs at better companies quickly.
also:
>They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
very smart economics, because they do it once and get to have it forever, for free, for everyone. it's charity.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people working on these clones aren't focused on making smart economic decisions for themselves with these projects.
"You failed at the thing you didn't try to do" isn't a strong point.
autoresearch can solve a lot of these issues and i am sure people are usually heavily heavily subsidized subscriptions
article seems very salty and im not sure why
also the economics is you open source something and its saves every one money and opens up more cross compile support, i bet this will scare companies to support linux more properly before linux users just start getting very good at cloning
I never thought I'd see an Adobe apologist...
The delusion of Imaginary Property is evaporating faster than ever. Those who try to desperately cling to it are going to lose.
It ruins the incentive to create
Only to those who believe in the delusion, that somehow everything they create is absolutely original, without realising how they gained that knowledge to create in the first place.
Meanwhile remixing (in the form of fanfiction, mash-ups, etc.) has always been part of human culture, and now AI is boosting that like never before.
We are effectively approaching post-scarcity in software and entertainment.
Reminder, 5 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177228 - (Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?)
wow
Sorry man, but this article reeks of desperation.
Yes, right now these vibe coded apps are not alternative, but the fact is that 6 months ago it would take years for a single person to build them. Who knows what will be available in the next 6 months?
We all need to come to terms with the fact that the landscape has changed and the implemetation is no longer a value.
I vibed and fixed all the stuff we use from Adobe. We don't use 8k*8k hasselblad whatnot; we use a few things that were terrible in open source and now are trivially replaced in a few weeks (yes yes the first vibe thing works but is not production ready; after a few weeks of daily fixes, it's good enough to cancel the subscription eeeh terminate the card you did the subscription on). Not everyone needs everything...
Why spend all these tokens when there's both good open source image editing software and working cracks and keygens out there?
You don't like Adobe's practices? Me neither. Just use GIMP or get a keygen and block Adobe's servers in a host file.
I've been vibe coding plenty of apps for personal use, especially to replace free Google stuff; I'm doing it for lack of trust and control those apps give me. Even more would apply to Adobe stuff.
Innovation in Adobe products? Really? I mean, really? Are you serious?
And the main argument is performance on high resolution?
This is happening across a lot of different industry types ..
In the music technology world, people are having an absolute field day vibe-coding alternative firmwares for devices which have long since been abandoned by their manufacturers.. and it is GREAT!
There is a very exciting revolution happening with the M-VAVE FM1 synthesizer, which has been reverse engineered - and now folks are producing firmwares for it, at a rate of 1 or 2 each week - which radically extend its functionality and give it features NONE of us expected.
For a $60 device, this is phenomenal - and it is fair to say that the M-VAVE FM1 is probably the hottest ticket item in the music technology world, today - putting a lot of manufacturers on notice that either they properly support their locked down, closed-garden products, or the users will.
Truly phenomenal.
And, there are many more such examples: a new firmware for the Arturia MicroFreak, for example, which adds more and more synth engines not considered by Arturia for inclusion (for whatever arbitrary reasons), but definitely shoe-horn'ed into place by MicroFreak users. See also the quite revolution happening around Behringers' firmwares, which is teaching them quite the lesson. I predict either Big Music Tech is going to embrace this trend - and start releasing devkits and SDK's for their systems - or they are going to go the other way and start encrypting their firmware such that AI kiddies can't gain access .. but for the decades of stuff thats already out there, its fair game.
(Details here for those interested, in general, in how music tech is being hacked into oblivion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDmAvZKtqq8 .. and for details about the FM1 and all the amazing firmwares being produced for it by vibecoders, reverse engineers, and hackers alike, check https://old.reddit.com/r/MVaveFM1/)
>>The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera
It's just a matter of time, AI will build the PS engine better. (in rust obviously)
The tone is angry but understandably so. The labour, creativity and innovation of millions is being stolen and then belittled by grifters shilling slop. Art, design, math, music, software, there's nothing they won't claim they can now copyright-launder and somehow magically render obsolete. But look at any of it and it's never more than the simulacrum of real work. It always looks like the real thing, particularly to the untrained eye but it's always a tissue-paper of stolen work and half-assed, half-working, sloppy output. The prompters are lazy and so are the models.
These are powerful, interesting tools but the money, the hype and the grift is just intollerable, a pox on it all. If you're a professional you cannot ignore or avoid it, but you can push towards a future where the commodification of it - open models, open weights, open hardware - turns it into a low-margin overlay on real intellectual work and the hype/grift machine can move on to whatever intellectually bankrupt boondoggle they find next.
Guess, that cruising phase of a ton of careers is cut short. Its back to the trenches, to work and shovel till death comes for us keyboard slaves. If some singularity demon can undo your moat, you never had one to begin with.
Cloning Photoshop is such an underwhelmingly unoriginal and unambitious design goal, like photocopying a Roy Lichtenstein painting, or cloning MS-DOS.
Treating Photoshop's interface as the destination squanders the opportunity to rethink how people create images.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
In a personal email about MVC and Morphic, published here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction: A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
https://www.billbuxton.com/natural.html
THE MACINTOSH AS VICTIM
Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.
> especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do)
Come on. Is this really necessary?
At the moment they seem to be cloning the UI and functionality. That is serious enough of a threat but it has its limits, particularly with old file formats like PSD or old MS Office that were a direct 1:1 mapping of C memory structs onto the disk.
But that won't be the case for too long I think. AI is nowadays capable of doing decompilation based on prior knowledge and educated guesswork - it isn't much of a stretch to assume that runtime code decryption / obfuscation will fall too. When humans can do it (see e.g. extremely talented people like the infamous Empress), AI will be able to as well.
It's quite nauseating to read through such sycophantic defense of a pretty evil entity like Adobe, but what does this even mean:
> One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do)
"Vibe coders" as a group have this issue? Author might benefit from some therapy sessions.
I mean this crap will die hopefully die off when they get priced out of the needed tokens and their customers realise that there’s a limit to how many times you can write “Claude fix this bug plz” before the “devs” actually need to wade into some real, and at the scale of a vibed up PS clone, extremely confusing engineering.
LLMs remain a microwave.
The entire reason you're seeing a lot of more ambitious reverse-engineering/decomp projects as of late is due to Claude Opus 5.5, which is cheaper than models have been over the past year, in addition to being smarter.
It's not 'crap'. If you try ArtCraft it's scarily good. I also don't get any of the brush lag mentioned, it's silky smooth.
OK, when I read "hate speech" it was finally clear this article is a gaslighting attempt. Should be flagged into oblivion.
> And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
> Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger.
I mean okay vibe coded photoshop clones is one thing but arguing your enemies are pedos and you're good guys that deserve all the gratitude in the world is not a great way to make an argument.
There are many good valid points in the whole insanity of the whole trend imo but this article drifts a LOT.
Adobe has been grifting us for ages, so…
OP isn't just making a straw man argument, they're making the entire straw family.
> Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job.
I legitimately cannot parse the logic behind this argument.
Poor performance? Photoshop takes like 30 seconds to cold start and when I tried Photocraft it opened in like a second.
I see it like this: because greenfield coding is strong with AI, but improving/large rewriting an existing codebase is getting progressively harder and worse, if you don't get the architecture right in the first try, improve them in later rounds will be very hard,if not futile. Thus the poor performance is not a typical day 1 problem as with human coding, but a pestilence.
It’s really badly put but I thiiiink they’re trying to say that due to the pace you can work with AI, you can have something technically complex but badly engineered quickly. Like three years of bad engineering in an afternoon? Or something? It’s still bad as even three months of bad engineering would normally contain far more foresight than a vibe coded weekend nonsense project
The article is strangely supportive of Adobe, far beyond a normal person's sense of ridicule.
Software development is about revenue, but specifically Adobe's revenue:
Pay us, don't innovate: Why do people hate Adobe more than other companies? What's the difference? Only sensitive insiders would pretend to ignore decades of enshittification. People noticed the "underage children", but defending Adobe customer support is even more ridiculous: