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Comment by handfuloflight | Hacker News Reader

What's the catch?

Missing and incomplete features, missing templates, presets and it's likely to be abandoned as issues will start to pile up.

The user experience is also not great with professional looking AI apps, I've just tried PhotoCraft and couldn't paste an image from the clipboard. Clone stamp doesn't have a live update, etc.

Another catch is that it's... PhotoShop. I'm not particularly a fan of the whole workflow. Creatives learned to live and work with it over the decades, so it works, but it's not really an intuitive tool.

I'd recommend looking into Affinity which is a merged version of PS+Illustrator. The product feels like it at least tries to be a little different. It's also free.

Try lopsy.art. I've been at it for 6 months. Updating and building out features almost daily. It's a Rust/WASM engine too. Also open source. github.com/theseamusjames/lopsy.art.

I think there are about a dozen of these now.

The website is entirely vibcoded and is thus free of useful information. I haven't tried the applications

It hasn’t had a massive QA team (and customer base) go through all the missing features and bugs.

No doubt it’ll get better in time.

More likely completely neglected.

It's just slop. Tried to install it via flatpak. It has flatpak instructions in the readme. It does not ship the flatpak files it references in the readme.

It's slop, and there's no telling if it will still be maintained a year from now.

I don't think you realize the depth of Adobe creative suite hate, an entire generation of artists came up on Krita/Affinity because Adobe decided to vampire its customers.

It's deep with a small number of very loud people.

...which is one of the benefits of it being open-sourced with a permissive license. If it stops being maintained, it can just be forked.

The "no one maintains AI slop" idiom is more for things which are bespoke and/or don't have much demand, and this clearly has demand.

Why would anyone help maintain this when they could vibe code their own though? Genuine question. As of the time I'm writing this there are already two other people linking their own Adobe clones in this comment section.

It takes a lot of tokens to vibecode something like this with the expected feature sets, and this domain is complex enough with enough edge cases and interactions such that it's infeasible to fully QA even programmatically.

Why ? Obviously it was possible to write Photoshop itself with human QA, and human QA is fundamentally limited ... and is more limited than programmatic QA. At the very least this repo will start to catch up fast with Photoshop, assuming it's maintained.

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