Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?
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Replacing a mature app with an incredibly wide audience and a million use cases may or may not be possible, but what's actually happening is that people are making an app that does exactly what they want, and using it to solve their own needs.
Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data. No Excel required.
Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.
No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs.
What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.
Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.
Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.
Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.
This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic. There aren't many useful, high quality APIs out there without a companion app these days.
I encourage you to ask members of your household what apps they use which don't connect with any other apps, sites, or companies. I think we'll find the number is pretty low.
In your mind, what are some apps which don't currently exist which would be solving a bespoke household issue that non-techies will be reaching for vibe coding to solve?
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not convinced the puddle is very deep. It's really hard to compare taking a photo with vibe-coding an app.
The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.
Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.
It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.
Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.
I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.
Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.
As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.
The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.
Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.
They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.
I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.
Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.
The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.
If you think of apps in the traditional sense I think I agree with you, but I have a feeling things are about to become a lot more messy.
Grandma might not even know she's building her own calendar app.
I don't think we are that far from being able to ask a general purpose AI to "help me not forget my family's birthdays" and it creating and maintaining code for that purpose. Not quite an app, but more than a one off script, I think AIs are going to unlock this weird situation where they're running a bunch of barely organized code almost as an extension of thinking.
The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.
> reducing the cost
The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.
Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.
It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional.
This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.
Six months of fiddling and $X00 in subscription/token fees to make a DIY inventory management app that's going to need regular attention and revision, with ongoing service fees, to accommodate not-quite-right implementations and hidden technical debt.
That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.
The industry needs to deliver on a lot more than that to justify the investments that have been made.
Isn't this exactly how many technologies get started?
A PC used to cost as much as a very nice used car, and had few practical uses cases, as one example.
That still seems like a simple CRUD app.
even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.
He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.
Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.
I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.
After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.
I have no clue about wine connoisseur apps but I have to assume that someone some where has build apps to manage the obvious data and now integrating AI into it so that it can do photo to text and reports and summaries etc.
If there are no other apps then commercializing the app might be a better win and use case.
If there are others apps then I can't imagine the nightmare where everyone has their own Supabase/Firebase/AWS etc instances and run their private apps because it does things exactly as what they want to do along with satisfaction of spending 6 months on it. Instead of paying for an app which might be used across the industry and helped them save those 6 months.
Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.
I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.
A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.
A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.
Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.
And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.
These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.
Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.
AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.
Not exactly revolutionary in the way you’re claiming.
The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is. Of the remaining who do, I would not be shocked that they’re capable of asking an LLM to produce one for them.
My use of the word “system” is very intentional vs. something less qualifying like “program”.
Edit to add: my take is proper system engineering and design basically requires general intelligence, so the bar for LLMs to reliably produce high quality systems is AGI.
Nowadays though, with relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
Sorry what? This is nonsense.
> as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
ahh there's the rub.
So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.
So what about the folk who don't use it professionally and have no access to cracked copies anymore ?
People keep confusing single player vs. multiplayer and forgetting "jobs to be done".
Photoshop files are the lingua franca of the design world. If you're working with designers, they'll likely give you a PSD (replace PSD with other examples in other domains, etc.)
Sure, I could vibe code "make a tool that lets me create multi-layered canvasses etc." but if I want to use it with anyone other than me, I have to make sure that it's binary compatible, bit for bit, with PSDs (or whatever's required to open it in Photoshop and maintain the layers).
This makes no sense to do this unless I'm targeting Photoshop specifically and plenty of tools already do this.
Other than a way to burn money, I am completely unsurprised such a thing isn't widely available (I'm sure someone, somewhere is/has tried this).
For most people, single-player Photoshop is a means to an end. If I have sufficiently advanced AI I can just describe what I want and get the end result (a button, image, whatever). Or even just point it at an image and say "add gaussian blur here".
I would never try and vibe-code a new editor just to make images.
This is also probably why nobody is vibecoding photoshop, why bother when a model can do it?
But over the next 5 years I expect a growth in Blender-like open-source projects aiming to take on the big closed-source elephants. Code is cheaper now. The main downside of LLM coding, unmaintainable spaghetti code, can be mitigated effectively with discipline and coordination.
You still need maintainers to uphold contribution standards, but people will throw tokens at you. A small, disciplined team can go a long way, make a decent enough product, and then attract the institutional money (like Blender did) and hit that growth curve where everyone rallies you and you've won.
Lots of companies would have a vested interest in reducing these dependencies to Adobe et al., or have a more customizable product. Competitive professional tools, more like Blender and less like GIMP, but in other areas, like DAWs, CADs, and others.
And often from data it makes up!
For instance I have created a snippet manager, because I didn’t like the one in Raycast. Or I have created a journal viewer because the daily notes in Obsidian are not easily viewed across days. And so I have dozens of smaller solutions that are tailored to my needs. And I am guessing lots of vibe coders do the same.
Would you rather press a button and go through a simple process that's normalized across all crud apps or talk to a chatbot every time you want to solve a problem and invoke external apis?
As per https://xkcd.com/1015/, I suspect many people are doing this and the artists hate all the examples even more than the average consumer who simply treats it as a sign of low-budget work.
My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror.
Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p...
That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
Lately ChatGPT can generate complex diagrams with lots of text so I used them to make slides.
The difference is that normally, people would perhaps pay a company to buy a PS license, or pay a professional to edit their images, however now this market segment will just use VLMs to edit the image to what they need.
2. Design professionals sell their work to businesses.
But if businesses start using AI image editing instead of contracting professionals, then Adobe won't have a market of Photoshop buyers.
Before you say that AI isn't good enough for the kind of business which pays for professional design, in one year it probably will be.
The author's point is not specifically about Photoshop. It's right there in the second paragraph:
>Where is the vibecoded Photoshop. The vibecoded Excel. The vibecoded Maya. The vibecoded Blender. The vibecoded compiler that compiles itself. The vibecoded database, the vibecoded OS, the vibecoded anything-that-requires-architectural-judgment-to-hold-together
What do all these examples have in common, besides requiring "architectural judgment-to-hold-together"?
They are software created by mid-large companies or organizations with a large of numbers of contributors. It's not about Photoshop, it's about developing complex software with high quality control and a continuous mature and continuous release cycle to a demanding set of hundreds/thousands of users. So to take that it in and then say, "Well, I don't think AI going to be used fo build that stuff, it's going to be directly used by non-technical end users to bypass existing more complex legacy software like Excel," is only proving the author's point.
Cause at the end of the day, what are all these companies "token-maxxing" actually building and selling to their customers? That's the larger point the author is making. Just as you imply, a large swath of apps and SaaS are being wiped out by end-users directly using AI. So the only viable path is to raise the bar on what is being built. Someone should be vibecodinfg a phone OS and vibe-building an actual phone alternative to Android and iOS, if it's actually possible. Someone should be vibecoding the Metaverse and vibecoding hundreds of Apple Vision Pro apps to make VR/AR actually viable (again). And on and on.
The only honest counterpoint to the author's post, unless you can cite vibecoded software at the level of scale and maturity they are seeking, should be:
Yeah, 2026 was the year the coding performance of LLMs passed a certain maturity threshold adoption-wise so we should realistically give it a few more years to see if it is actually possible to vibecode continuously released ambitious complex software used by demanding users on the scale you mention.
See this paragraph:
> There are no vibecoded Photoshops because vibecoding does not do what the rhetoric claims it does. The accusation itself is the vibe. The accuser feels that a thing must have been easy because it was made with AI. They post that feeling as if it were a finding. The finding never has to be checked, because nobody else checks it either. The accusation travels because it feels right, not because it is right. Big difference.
> The accusation that someone produced unverified output is itself being produced as unverified output
As best I can tell, the author is saying that it's unrealistic to expect that a vibecoded photoshop would YET exist since just because you can use AI to help doesn't make the task much easier or quicker. If this is the right take, then I guess he's really talking about AI-assisted development (i.e. AI coding used as a tool by a human developer), rather than "vibe coding" in the sense of "here's some specs - write this for me". With AI as a coding tool, then all the hard work is still left to the human - coding it up once you've specced and designed it was never the hard part.
With Karpathy-style vibe coding - just tell the AI what you want it to build - it's either going to succeed fast or fail fast, so "where is the vibecoded Photoshop" is then a reasonable question, albeit a rhetorical one, reflecting that this type of "gimme X" vibecoding isn't able to produce something of that nature, so of course if doesn't exist.
e.g.
>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.
This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.
Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.
The author is someone in the demoscene who has been accused of "vibe coding" large pieces of work.
His counter is that if such things are possible, where is the vibe coded Photoshop?
He then goes on a tangent that "vibe coding" is a kind of easy accusation mostly levelled at "neurodiverse" developers
Which is why he ends the post:
So.
Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?
WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?
I'm waiting.
– gizmoThat's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.
Something similar happened with the invention of the synthesizer. (Specifically, the giant, modular Moog and its contemporaries like the Arp.) People made accusations about the synthesizer doing all the work and playing all the music; when in reality it was often harder (at the time) to play the synthesizer than traditional keyboarded instruments.
You can learn about this if you read about some of the accusations against Keith Emerson.
A lot of AI writing is bad and you notice it immediately. AI changes the cost calculus towards unnecessary verbosity and exploring paths that lead to nowhere. Writing block is usually because you don't have anything to say. If you had anything to say, the words would just flood out of your fingers. Easily two thousand to four thousand words per day. You wouldn't be able to keep up physically with your own brain.
I don't know or care whether the blog post is written with AI, but it's not a very good article, because it fails to explain what "the accusation" is, who "the accusers" are and who is being "accused". Despite it being the core part of the article and it being in opposition to the title the article endlessly drifts in its own vagueness, where nothing is concrete and everything is unsaid. It's a puzzle where you're supposed to put the pieces together, you're supposed to just get it and know what the author is thinking, without the author ever having to bother explicitly telling you, so that no matter what interpretation you choose, the author can always gotcha you that you didn't get it, when "it" was never conveyed.
The Photoshop and the gate/level paragraphs are easily read as a criticism of vibe coding, but the accusation paragraphs are a defense of vibe coding.
Honestly, this is giving me "heads I win, tails you lose" vibes.
The rough argument being made is that a bunch of folks go around lobbing vibe coding accusations at LLM users, because those folks are afraid that LLMs are taking their coding jobs. And that this anger is misdirected, since coding wasn't actually the moat in software development, and LLMs aren't making much of a dent in software architecture or product design.
I read the post, but I find it incoherent.
Things like, drop an image, get a printable label sheet that force-overrides all margin and scaling settings (recent upgrade to a tool I had that did that with plaintext address data), or metadata-preserving image cropper with some OpenCV magic to auto-straighten images and then allow free-form cropping that snaps to lines and features in the image, etc.
All of those have three things in common: they're dedicated to a very specific task or class of tasks that I happen to be doing, they each took less than an hour to create, and they exist specifically so I don't have to deal with whatever incidental bullshit that Photoshop or Word or Affinity or other Professional Tools For This Job throw at me.
(The label printer thing in particular was a pure frustration job.)
Pretty sure there's tons of such vibe-coded apps around - that do their jobs well, displace the classical general-purpose tools for their authors, but also they're too specialized to try and productionize/release.
EDIT: more recently, I even gave up on creating some of the apps in cases I normally would, after I noticed I can talk Claude on the mobile app into writing and running Python code, which turns out sufficient for many tasks involving data and image analysis.
The same happens with whatever tool you vibe-code. You get the average of the worst quality open source versions that exist, combined with some randomness.
This is not "do one thing and do it well", this is "do one thing no matter how".
Why do you believe that? What if I care so much about black and white and need a specific algorithm, isn't it much better to do that through a tool I can control rather than any proprietary one?
My point is that AI bros are forgetting that the LLM is only as good as the person using it. If you don't sufficiently understand the problem you're solving, your solution will be terrible. If you believe that AI will simply take that work away from you and do it itself, you should ask your favorite LLM to explain how LLMs work.
Like an experienced digital artist would.
And I don't have 10k -100k to blow on Nvidia cards nor to buy a few 100gb of RAM.
LLMs are approaching the affordances that OpenSource claimed to offer but never did.
Non-coders are discovering the basics of - for example - Python scripting and running with it.
If this gets easy enough - questionable so far, but maybe one day - all code will be "Do this thing to this photo/document/music project."
The big toolbox products will become redundant.
Everyone is distacted by content generation, but if LLMs get good enough it will be possible to go back a step and give everyone a toolbox factory they can use to imagine and build whatever they want, with full control, instead of the current stab-around-until-you-find-something generative approach.
I suspect that if you start seeing vibecoded "PhotoShop alternatives" productised, they won't look like PhotoShop at all: They'll be something like a bunch of image manipulation tools with an agent loop and scripting, to make it easier to create and run a bunch of 0.1%-Photoshops on-the-fly and save/reuse them.
So something more like Claude's artefacts support, just hiding the techie bits for users not comfortable with that, with specialised tooling.
I'm guessing we'll see a bunch of apps like that eating into various traditional big monolithic tools.
This isn't new most businesses are run on scripts that process data. The only difference now is that more people can write them instead of paying for an app.
So the narrative here is wrong. Because vibe coding an app is overkill, in the same way that paying through the nose for a giant app that you only use one basic feature set of is.
Since I have had AI to knock up Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG, I have devolved a lot of tedious Photoshop work to scripts and routines of some kind. Likewise with text and data manipulation that I might have turned to software for before.
I don't have the slightest urge to incorporate this ad hoc collection of scripts into a central program, and I certainly don't intend to share them in any way, considering the growing hostility to sharing vibe-code.
So this particular iceberg may be 99% underwater.
Why would I pay 10€/month to Adobe so that I can stitch two images together in a specific way?
It took me maybe 2€ worth of credits to make a fully self-contained web page that does that.
High quality code hasnt lowered in cost. Arguably it's gone up actually because more slop needs to be cleaned up.
And, for all people drone on about "customers/the business dont care about code quality they care about results" the indirect side effects of code quality are things they do care about deeply they just cant connect the dots.
Currently, I am working on a smaller-than-Photoshop solo side-project that would have taken years, but now I am close to a beta after 6 months. If the main work is coding, I am easily 10x as productive. But those productivity gains don't hold up when teams are larger, because communication and processes are not really accelerated. So be a bit more patient. It's too early to expect vibecoded Photoshops.
It is. Look at GitHub repos. Look at the r/selfhosting subreddit. Look at the r/macapps subreddit.
That doesn't mean people are "vibecoding Photoshop." Maybe LLMs will eventually be good enough that you can make a Photoshop without ever looking at any of the code, but they aren't right now.
"And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up."
What accusation?
This article reads like an LLM wrote it.
Vibe all you want, use it for yourself. Not every brain fart program has to be a "startup" you are the "CEO" of.
Like of all the products OP could have chosen, photoshop shouldn't have been the one that is chosen because it actually has a good clean competitor to it in the "free" category that theoretically slopshop would replace.
So how long do we have to wait? The reality is the actual output doesn’t match the hype at all.
Software engineers should be getting laid off all over the place, there should be a decrease in hiring period. This is not what’s happening.
Dunno if the companies whose product subscriptions I've cancelled will fire people because of it though. Maybe eventually?
GPT 5.4 came out at the start of March, GPT 5.5 end of April.
What do you expect, that we all go to market with a Photoshop competitor within two months?
Edit: and I can't provide any more replies since once again some automatic system or a mod rate limited my account for whatever reason.
"I am 100x productive with AI, I can ship in days what took months before" and "oh no, you don't understand, it's not really possible to vibecode Photoshop" found elsewhere in this thread.
If I were magically 100x productive, the first thing I would do would be to recreate Photoshop.
I ask because Photoshop probably wouldn’t have a market if it was introduced in 2026.
What would you be hoping to accomplish by recreating Photoshop?
Canva and Figma are layout tools, not for pixel editing.
Recreating it would make it faster and cheaper, something that has been driving software for decades.
(Nope, Krita and GIMP are not good enough)
> AI lowered the cost of Level 1. It did not touch Levels 2 or 3.
I feel like AI is firmly taking over Level 2 too. But more importantly, is that why no one vibecoded Photoshop? I think it's probably because it took >1 million man-hours to build it, so even at a 100x speedup it's not a very attractive project.
For example, I've had quite a few situations when I asked Claude Code to do some manual work for me, assuming it would do manual edits across several files, but it instead decided to write a script, and even a small test suite for it. It's a small encroachment so far, but I don't see any limitation for it gradually taking on actual product decisions.
I’m not sure I completely agree.. I think these types of questions are more a response to the level of hype around LLMs and less about knocking people down. You see a lot of people excited about the personal productivity app they vibe-coded (which IMO is totally legit - it’s cool that run-of-the-mill apps that used to require a professional developer are now available more on demand), and yet it’s hard to think of a new piece of high-impact traditional software that has come out since the release of ChatGPT.
But it’s also hard to think of the most recent piece of important traditional software that came out… at all. I couldn’t even name the most recent Photoshop-like release. Ableton / Fruityloops? Tableau? Big pro-sumer apps kind of plateaued in the early 00s.
LLMs have made it easier to develop software, but at the same time they’ve also raised the bar of what’s worth writing software to do. Many things that used to be apps are now just prompts. Maybe ChatGPT was the next Photoshop - it turned writing basic apps from a profession into a hobby.
Anyway. Good post - definitely not written by an LLM, and that’s a good thing.
You're not.
> it starts by raising this question, then argues that it’s kind of a cheap and meaningless punch-down.
The cheap and meaningless punch-down in the article is the vibecoding accusation. The question in the title is actually their main line of attack against that accusation, all the way to the end.
>> QED So. Where are the vibecoded Photoshops? WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?
>>I'm waiting.
I find it hilarious that so many people are finding it so difficult to grasp even the general line of argument of the article despite trying earnestly.
Are you serious?
I'm not sure exactly how many lines of code say Excel is, but if we estimate 10 MLOC of closed-source, then it would take a serious pile of cash for some SOTA LLM to reverse-engineer it. Especially given the fact that we don't have the code at hand to port.
Of course, we could use some open version of it, as best approximation, but there's still a ton of reverse engineering involved, which will burn tokens like crazy.
So the question becomes: What incentives are there for lone devs, or smaller teams, to vibe-clone some of the products, if it is going to cost them a fortune to do so? These things need funding.
Can I vibe code an image editor? Sure! I have, actually, just more as a curiosity. I got as far as a simple Canva replacement, and if that's what you need, maybe the question isn't can you vibe code Photoshop but rather can you vibe code Canva.
Photoshop is part of a gigantic ecosystem of tools, formats, and plugins that happens to have an image editor. More to the point, I've got an employee who has been using the Adobe ecosystem for decades, dating all the way back to the tools acquisition by Adobe. We have files that started as Pagemaker layouts in the 90s that are still in use. Could any given piece of new work be done in, say, GIMP? Of course! Does that get me out of my Adobe subscription for working with legacy files and having a Swiss Army knife for anything that might come along? Unfortunately, no.
It’s written mostly in very readable Pascal with some 68000 assembly.
For those not familiar (or not old as me), Pascal was popular in 80s. The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like.
LLMs are good at converting programming languages; it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to convert it to Swift, Rust, etc.
[1]: https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...
(Also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633)
So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
> Level 3 is the deciding. What to build at all [...] AI lowered the cost of Level 1. It did not touch Levels 2 or 3.
Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
The LLMs suck at testing still, so the feedback cycle still requires human input
Same way as LLMs cannot code anything complex, they cannot test complex scenarios.
The only underlying rule that I see is: the more complex a task is, the lower the probability of success. That's it. And it's the same exact rule that applies to humans. The difference though is that we're seeing an exponential growth in AI capabilities, which are then rapidly disseminated on a scale of months, and we don't see such capability increases in humans.
As I see it, anyone whose mental model is built on what AI can or cannot do is going to have a very bumpy decade.
> but I have a lot of machinery in front of them to enable it
My first project was an “old school” node editor done almost entirely with agentic coding. I slapped an MCP on it to see if the agents could make cool stuff and it was mostly hit or miss, but nothing too mind blowing. Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...
My second take on this is to channel coding agents into “prompt nodes” coupled with some agent orchestration. This helps define clear data flows and API contracts for each node + overall graph. This strategy works better since we’re constraining the problem space and overall getting better results when combined (and it also plays nice with context window limitations). The current demo is a bit slow and basic but it’s looking promising! https://sxp.studio/apps/subjectivezero
A lot of things that were previously accomplished with Photoshop + training + practices are now done directly in one prompt (e.g. https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation/)
But it's more like, still open to debate but sounds likely: how long until vibe coding is powerful enough to generate Photoshop alternatives quickly?
So yeah I think people would concede the point that vibe coding isn't quite all there yet; but is it there at the size of a function or module or collection of small pieces of code? Definitely.
The other part of the conversation is about how AI-assisted coders may be doing other things than creating a Photoshop alternative. Maybe many of us don't need Photoshop and use something like Gimp instead. Maybe people feel existing software like Photoshop or its alternatives are "sufficient enough" so they're building something else instead. Maybe the people who use Photoshop lack incentives or skills to vibe code an app themselves, and maybe the people who don't use it aren't interested in creating a Photoshop alternative.
Maybe there are other bottlenecks than just code generation that are holding back more alternatives being created: where to post code after you create it, when there is more "noise" online; of getting ideas for things to create in general, which might be a problem independent of AI; of other economic and social conditions that have people focused on solving other problems currently rather than creating a Photoshop alternative.
So I think the point stands that we don't have the expected Photoshop alternatives currently, but I think we will probably see more of that in time, and we might also see AI be used in other ways than may be expected (another comment for example suggested maybe people might skip Photoshop altogether and just use AI to generate photos or effects; I can appreciate the idea that this doesn't replace how a lot of people use Photoshop, but on the other hand I can also think of some instances where it might for some people).
https://github.com/light-and-ray/awesome-alternative-uis-for...
AI has obliviated both the need and the desire for discrete pixel manipulation outside of the existing professional disciplines. It has been replaced by the explosion of diffusion models with a direct human language --> pixel image loop.
It feels like a massive chore and will likely cost more to do than lifetime of your subscription, not to mention alternative cost of not being able to do other things because you are vibe coding photoshop.
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Performance art.
not some iteration of a markdown reader, that's easily copied of GitHub. or some useless React app - that doesn't interact with external data like most businesses do.
look around u - even the biggest companies can't ship software that works. n u expect an LLM to do so.
leave the LLM to be a better search.
That said, it's been a whole lot of fun to build, and the real wins are in the tangents it lets me go off on. I spent a whole day building a "badge lab" and just adding random features and sliders. I had a sunset motif in the background of a garden planner I was sketching out, and it led to this, which took a day or two: https://orochi235.github.io/experiments/interstellar-horizon....
I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.
Nah, you don't. You're doing that junior developer humblebrag thing. You have to prove how good you are with the hot new thing. "Look at me, I'm better at something than the gray beards."
AI is just a tool, and a commercial one at that. You're proud of your ability to use a tool, congratulations. But you're letting it go to your head. "All those level 1s are left behind! Haha!" It's a tool. I remember being told if I didn't learn Microsoft Word there would be no jobs for me in the white collar workplace. If you won't buy Microsoft "go be a dumb tradie" or something was the implication. Sound familiar? It does to me.
And trust me, all your pride in using this tool will not be enough. There will still be someone who claims to hold level 4 or level 5. "Oh, you're just an AI user? Haha, I feel sorry for such a level 3 loser! I'm training models and tuning hyper parameters on level 50!" Because that's what insecure people do. They constantly feel a need to prove themselves, because they never reached a state of acknowledgement by their peers. They want to be one of the greats, but have never been recognized as such.
Same goes for slack.
If you are a person using Photoshop and you're vibecoding you're better off just vibecoding what you need to streamline workflows, reduce human mistakes, have better integration with other business concerns, better ai integration, etc. since it has less features, you're not going to be able to/want to competitively offer it on the marketplace, so it won't have much visibility, if any.
Photoshop is a (formerly?) great toolbox. Toolboxes are good if you need to cater to a wide audience. An audience of one via bespoke software - the real revolution - doesn't need the full photoshop experience.
Countless examples previously requiring photoshop are now replaced with some ffmpeg and imagemagick pipelines written by AI daily.
An example:
I do game dev as a hobby, and target the browser as the platform.
Before I would shim general purpose tools into the development lifecycle because I was more interested in building games not tools. Now, I'm accumulating tiny single purpose tools that fit my usecases much more closely.
Where before it would be super expensive and probably inappropriate to create tightly coupled tools to a single data model / usecSe now it's super cheap, just part of the sdlc.
The end result for me is a much more ergonomic and taylor fit experience that helps me achieve my end goal. Am I going to release these tools? Absolutely not. It wouldn't make sense for anyone outside of potsandpans' gamedev loop.
So, I think this accusation is a bit "old world" thinking. I don't expect to see a million photo shops. There's already general purpose photo editing software: photoshop and gimp. I _might_ expect to see savvy devs and artists using photoshop less and using custom tools more. We might not even see or hear about that, other than when photoshop sales drop.
Huge swathes of the economy basically runs on Microsoft Office - internal and external business communication is via Powerpoint in meetings, internal and external documentation is via Word, internal analysis (big and small) is via Excel, collaboration is done reasonably well via Sharepoint, and they have the network effect that everyone else uses it too.
The reality is that the alternatives just don't stack up. Google's suite is great for collaboration and okay for limited work, but falls over completely when faced with large documents (imagine thousands of pages for a regulatory submissions) or spreadsheets with large amounts of data. Other options (Libre Offce, Softmaker Office, etc.) may excel in some domains, but offer a steep learning curve, and/or may be unreliable with Microsoft Office format compatibility, and/or are weak on the collaboration side.
If you want to put it in such dumb terms: AlphaFold.
However, Photoshop and Excel aren't only code. They're a culture, a social environment. They are the user base that built a social environment that nurtures these products and makes them culturally relevant. This social environment can't be build in 2 years.
I think of "tokens" as units of intelligence spent on a problem.
Producing software like Photoshop, Linux, or Excel literally cost billions of tokens (human intelligence back then, and now both human and artificial intelligence combined). A lot of deep intellectual problems were solved along the way, and the token cost of solving them accumulated. The true cost of Photoshop today should be measured in billions, maybe trillions of tokens.
AI can definitely generate some tokens, and it has accelerated everything involving intelligence. But it still can't produce 100 billion tokens worth of intelligence in a week. When that day comes, that's superintelligence. We'll go to Mars, we'll make fusion work. That's the singularity.
Trust me this version of me can't write code better than an LLM. I think even the LLMs from 2 years ago could do as much.
Only thing we have solved with LLMs is how to generate code, as in literally converting what you type in as text into something somewhat working. Fixing the details is impossible for AI.
Today and beyond.
Now Open AI and Anthropic are launching own Service firm/wing for maximizing ROI. Direct Competition. Huge Loss for Indian IT Service Firms.
They paid AI providers to Train own automated competition end to end so much so that they are learnt the gaps and how-to own the market by corrections, private IP Source code access and embedded expertise extraction (stopping short of calling it literal corporate espionage, they got all the know-how and especially for modernizing legacy tech and integrations).
They are untrustworthy especially where IP is involved.
Indian and other IT Firms who did not use private self-hosted AI for important things nor monitored the usage and did not train their employees to think what ( or how much) of our institutional knowledge goes out to third-party are already facing trouble.
A proxy for it would be we see a huge wave of lay offs.
This is not happening.
We can now simply buy an artificial form of intelligence to solve intellectual problems. That doesn't mean we can buy our way into solving every problem in a week.
Building Photoshop or Excel still has a huge intellectual cost. We can use AI to help us get there, but it won't be free, it's just getting marginally cheaper.
The author seems unwell
So that it would be easily to add functionalities with plugins - for file reading, oganization, edit, and everything.
I generally agree with the comment that “architecture is the bottleneck,” but based on my own experience, I’d like to elaborate further.
I don’t think the issue lies in code generation capabilities. The code generated by LLMs is competent on its own; the real bottleneck is cross-cutting consistency, which I believe is the primary challenge for applications on the scale of Photoshop.
For example, when I had Claude perform the task of “adding a new order type” to my trading bot: -Implementation in the relevant file: 90% success on the first try -Compatibility fixes on the backtesting engine side: 60% success with no oversights -Cross-cutting concerns like logging, metrics, and notifications: 40% of these were missed
The missed parts pass both compilation and testing. I’ve experienced the most troublesome kind of failure: the code is broken in terms of specifications but cannot be detected mechanically.
Photoshop has an estimated tens of thousands of cross-cutting invariants. Every these tools must operate without conflict across all layer types, selection ranges, and color modes. However, reconciling all of this with a single LLM inference seems impossible with the current architecture.
In other words, the absence of a “vibecoded Photoshop” isn’t due to a superficial lack of capability in the LLM; rather, the current context window and attention mechanisms are structurally unsuited for maintaining global invariants. This may not be the kind of problem that can be solved simply by “scaling up.”
Conversely, the direction of “personalized bespoke small apps” pointed out by stevex has fewer cross-cutting invariants (since the functionality is localized) and aligns with areas where AI excels. My personal conclusion is that Photoshop and AI development are not competing; they are simply solving different problems.
Since these observations are based on Python-based projects, this cross-cutting failure pattern might be less pronounced in statically-checked languages like Java or Rust. I’d like to hear others’ observations on this.
For artists and creatives, _all levels_ have been taken away. And for most, their very basic needs (i.e. income) are being taken away.
And all that, just so we can get past "level 1"? Not even "level 4"? What kind of trade off is that??
We're supposed to be engineers. We spend days/weeks discussing how a table should be designed so it doesn't bite us in 6 months time. Yet here we are discarding almost _everything_ just to make "level 1" a little bit more convenient.
It's pathetic.
Go suffer until something good happens in your fingers.
I can totally see how ai could do the same thing to all sorts of art industries that have not had their Napster moment yet.
It's true that we're not there yet for very complex software, but corporations don't place bets on today's market. They are placing bets on how the market is going to look like 2, 3 years from now.
> there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising.
“If AI is so great why hasn’t it reproduced (some incredible cathedral of software built over 40 years of intensive hand crafting).”
Don’t feed the trolls folks - nothing you say in reply can convince the poser of the question because it’s a trap not a question, designed to validate the askers worldview that AI is somehow fake.
Happy I can use Claude for more trivial things, but if the AI labs wanted an actual benchmark, Photoshop or Davinci Resolve would be it.
The result is always the same: a beautiful UI, everything feels smooth and responsive, but the core logic doesn’t actually work.
I think this is exactly what the author is talking about.
For Photoshop there are already "competitors", such as Canva or GIMP or countless others. But adoption has been limited.
Why ?
Because of the tightknit Adobe integration. If I create something in Photoshop, I can pull it in natively into any other programme in the Adobe suite ... e.g. InDesign (desktop publishing), Indesign (vector illutration), Premiere (non-linear video editing) or After Effects (motion graphics).
Not only can I pull it in natively, but in most cases I benefit from Adobe Dynamic Linking. Which means if I go back and mess with the Phtoshop file, it is automagically updated in all my child projects elsewhere.
Do not underestimate the sheer boost to the workflow and time savings that that provides !
Building on the above, if I'm recruiting designers, there is a very high chance they've spent the last 20 years using Photoshop. Am I going to waste my time and theirs forcing them to learn GIMP or whatever ? No. I will just get them an Adobe license.
Now let's hypothesize that my theoretical designer that I just employed has produced a product in InDesign that we're sending off to the printers....
If you want to get the best out of your printer during the pre-flight process, then you're absolutely want to be sending them a PDF file that came out of the Adobe toolset. Why ? Because your printer can send you Adobe-ready preflight-validation config files and because your printer can help you with issues. Not using Adobe ? Prepare for your printer to say "on your own chum".
Adobe is not perfect, but they command the market dominance they do for very good reason.
Why would I release it? Everyone can vibecode their own.
What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?
Can it be done? Probably. But the token cost to do so would be astronomically expensive. You still need a human (read prompt engineer) to steer the AI. Even small ideas I’ve thrown at it to test viability is often plagued by code that just simply doesn’t work. I am constantly having to send it back and say “this doesn’t work” and it will eventually figure it out but that is more wasted tokens just to get something that doesn’t throw an error during the build process.
One-off specialty programs are absolutely going to feel the heat. Take a multi-tone generation application (think Motorola pagers). You can now ask an AI to create that program for you, complete with tone generation and .wav recordings to use later.
Large programs are relatively safe for the moment just because of scale. But any small application that is usually behind some sort of paywall or license is absolutely going to be threatened since it’s no longer difficult to throw together a program in an evening and have 100% of the features you want and none of the features you didn’t need or want.
Everybody (not actually everybody) has wanted one for 20+ years, and almost nobody made it.
And, well, to display the image I guess. Or maybe you'd want to print it, but the printer needs firmware, and firmware is an application itself.
being able to build the stack and create bespoke solutions with llms's is incredible..
idk why people get mad about vibe-coding. if ur little brother can make a Spotify clone with Claude in a day, shouldn't that mean that you as a dev should be able to create something 100x better that makes Spotify obsolete?
good ideas / feasible novel architecture design will be the only thing valuable..
- Don’t bring a forklift to your gym
- LLMs are more like 3D printers than fully automated factories / dark factories.
Curious what other analogies have found staying power.
Sending patches to an existing kernel is joining the dots, but do your own!
LLMs make easy problems easier, but they do not make hard problems so.
For me, AI greatly reduces the TOIL - tooling, scripts, refactoring runs, and that's great. It does not, however, excuse you from knowing how to build solid, maintainable software past your little vibe sandbox.
Why is this the measure of success?
This perhaps isn't an issue at any meaningful industry as I think there is little room in the space for a new OS to take off, but within hobbyist circles it seems it's becoming a problem. On subreddits such as r/osdev, a lot of interesting-looking projects are being called out for their code having a lot of AI hallmarks: commit history showing an entire OS with a shell and GUI being written in a week, almost exclusively very large, non-atomic commits, comments that randomly include words from a different language, and snippets of code that are blatantly plagiarised from well-known projects in the community.
It's such a strange thing to see, because it's an area of programming that has almost zero practical need these days. We already have three big desktop operating systems that cover 99% of use cases, and there are already projects that fill most other gaps. Unless you have a really specific problem that can't be solved by patching Linux, writing a whole new OS and everything that comes with it is unlikely to be worth the time. IMHO, the only reason to write an OS in current year is for the hell of it; if you're really interesting in programming and computers, you like solving problems, and you like building large, complex systems, writing an OS can be a really fun long-term project. If you do none of the work and simply leave an LLM to plan out the system and solve all the problems, you gain absolutely nothing from it.
If we wanted to replace any of these operating systems in 10 years, or needed to, the best time to start would be now.
"Where are the vibecoded X app replacements?" questions aren't asking that question, they are making the argument that the author is. Software is immensely complicated and "vibecoding" is not going to build products.
You could reword the original question as: "If LLM coding is so fantastic and game changing, why are major products which are hugely profitable not battling with other companies which are producing competitors? Why would OpenAI/Anthropic sell the LLM access itself, instead of hoarding all the compute they can and become mega conglomerates in a takeover of all software?"
The author argues that software is way more complex than some prompt can describe, and that's what the original question also states. Level 1/2/3 BS nothing - coding was never and will never be the hard part.
I don't particularly like phrasing the argument I described as "where are the vibecoded X?" but instead as "Why are there so many issues still with major products? Why does Windows still have so many issues? Why is performance still absolutely shit on nearly every application?" The answers to these are not solved by more code, but by actual engineering, which LLMs don't provide. But the LLM dealers will try their best to convince you that they do provide on this level.
Because selling shovels is a guaranteed way to earn you money, unlike digging for gold.
Didn't even gather a single vote, to be able to even show up in the show hn category (Like my 3 other AI projects shared here recently).
Have a look at the https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew category when logged in where new products first appear, it's just an ocean of flagged and show dead.
Agents (even fully local like in my case), exhibit fun behavior and are capable or designing their own fonts from scratch.
The difference between slop and non-slop, is just how long you run the agent loop, and how much you spend on quality control.
Then it's all about the economics game, on how much you should spend between marketing and artefact creation to have a money generating loop by pushing the slop through your users throat.
There is just so much content being produced, that it disperse the effort and potential customers, raising the barrier to reach this self-sustaining state required for growth and quality. In the end, existing players will just run the same agent loop from their dominant position and keep their advantage.
The fact you started the text with is true: there aren't vibecoded complex apps, because vibecoding doesn't work.
The rest of the text is an incoherent rambling that looks like two people arguing and doesn't make any sense.
You should probably stop using gen AI and seek therapy.
From what I can piece together he seems to think that agentic coded projects are being routinely dismissed as mere slop, and he feels that is wrong. But I’m not sure how that connects with the argument that if vibe coding were so great why haven’t we seen a duplicate of photoshop?
I can argue that vibe coding is bad even if someone produces something with it that seems good. Not saying I necessarily want to, but I could. Just because you have “90 test cases” that pass, or that you personally are happy with your own product is not proof of the success of vibe coding. (It is evidence, perhaps, but not proof… The evidence can be debated.)
I’m not a booster a doomer or a boomer but I think it’s a reasonable litmus test for LLM coding to implement 80% of an existing app or service. It’s not an accusation against anyone using LLM (I do) nor is it an excuse to take shots, it’s just a way of framing SotA capabilities.
Weird article, perhaps I missed something.
Aperture discontinued, one of the engineers in the team built a replacement, yet it's not Aperture.
Pixelmator did the "impossible", Apple bought them instead of doubling down on their talent and resources.
Small yet powerful editors like Acorn and Camera Bag Pro has no practical competitors in their spaces.
Technical problems are easy, yet humans and things involving human interaction is hard. You can't solve non-tangible problems by remixing tangible bits of code.
Heck, even Photoshop revamped a couple of dialog boxes, and a number of people got angry, because it behaves slightly differently and throws decades of muscle memory out of the window, and that costs people considerable amount of time.
I am upset with the fact that we are accumulating code debit faster than ever. In the most optimistic view, we could pay off those debit in around 10+ years (assume somebody care pay the money to buy token to clean up those).
That meant we need to suffer 10+ years of low quality code and software.
recently, I tried to make AI write Long Form Novel.
The first problem I see is, AI have no idea what is important.
Teaching them when and where to use active voice/passive voice, who needs to be the subject, when to change the focus is just impossible. They love to add comparison and contrast on something least important. They love to use long list of adjective, which is unrelated to the context in current story chapter, just because those adjective are in my character file.
Understanding which problem is important in when and why is something hard.
I think same problem would appear in larger computer programs.
Moving the goalpost.
(The domain, FWIW, is a geospatial transport-planning tool, including a completely custom microsimulation engine, with loads of options for visualization, analytics, etc.)
At the start of this development process, LLMs were capable of assisting with little more than the framework boilerplate stuff. That was very useful, but was well under 50% of the LOC. They were particularly bad at understanding the microsimulator, where they would routinely forget which end of a FIFO queue was the front. LLMs are routinely and correctly criticized for their lack of a true world model, and when it came to modelling real-world physical/spatial/geographic systems, the fact that they see the world as nothing but text was a huge limitation. Not just in terms of having a pretty hazy grasp on concepts like "spatial direction", but even more critically, being unable to rationalize about the "world-within-a-world" which the simulator is attempting to model. They were fully unable to do that.
That was 18 months ago. Now, Claude writes > 99% of my code. It demonstrates a far better grasp of first-order world-model phenomena (like "spatial orientation"), and a decent (but not fantastic) ability to reason about the second-order "world-within-a-world" that the simulator is creating. It's a huge improvement. For some areas of the code, I still need to spell things out very explicitly, giving precise instructions for how a method will work. That's definitely not vibe-coding. But for other areas of the code, I can just say "add this analysis or visualization feature", without specifying how, and Claude will one-shot a result that's somewhere between good and great.
So where we're at now is that Claude often needs hand-holding for some of the most complex areas of the code, and it definitely doesn't understand how the whole application hangs together -- I have to keep reminding it of that, and am constantly taking steps to ensure that it remains well-architected doesn't devolve into a collection of warring patches.
And yet -- in the past 18 months, the boundary between what the LLM is capable of and what I need to exercise control over has shifted MASSIVELY, and it has shifted in the direction of LLMs being more able to rationalize about meta-models and higher-order architectures.
I've got two small children. When they say they can't do something, I always remind them that they can't do that thing -- YET. What they can do today is very far from the ultimate limits of their capabilities. I feel similarly about the capabilities of LLMs. No, they definitely can't vibecode a Photoshop-class application. YET.
That might be a letdown for some.
[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... does nice charts