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Comment by xyzsparetimexyz | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a major problem here is that people are more interested in vibeslopping their own Photoshop clone than contributing to an existing one. This results in a situation where theres a million clones that split the market and don't gain any traction.

I'll stick to gimp I guess.

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You can view it as a problem, or a point on a trend line where building software becomes ever easier and cheaper. If you follow that trend far enough, when you need for something Photoshop-shaped, you ask for it, and you get exactly the functionality you need. If you need it to do something PS doesn't, that capability just appears.

I've said it in other venues, but we're reaching a point where using someone else's software is like chewing someone else's gum.

One thing I don’t get about “personal software” is - why would you want something photoshop shaped, when you can describe what your image should look like? Most common issue - passport photos with specific background requirements and aspect ratios. Just take a photo on your phone, ask Gemini to meet the specs - you are done.

Because describing something in words will never have the fidelity of directly applying the changes yourself.

Like writing prompts will never have the fidelity of directly writing code? :)

Yes exactly, you can just ask for the outcome. But PS is also a creative tool. If you want to do digital painting (in contrast to simply producing a digital painting), you may want something PS-shaped.

Or if you want to apply nondestructive edits to a photo, and you realize that PSD is actually a pretty safe forward-compatible option, you may want adjustment layers and a PSD writer.

I think most of the time people don’t want to use software, they just want their problem solved. But creativity is a notable exception.

Why not just ask for an image?

If I have magic box that can give me anything, I'm not going to ask for tools and materials to build a house, I'm gonna ask for a house.

> ...that capability just appears.

For now, while we are still riding this wonderful subsidized AI gravytrain, but how much will it cost in tokens/$$$ next year when investors finally want a return on their investment? Or if the AI bubble pops? I doubt running 7B models locally will suffice, even at the rate of improvement we are seeing.

then they can generate tutorials on how to use said software, and you can relearn basic things you could do in other software until you expire

Nobody wants to be on the hook for building and maintaining their own half-assed Photoshop clone. That is literally never going to happen.

And yet look, it is happening now.

It’s not happening now. These projects are basically spam and largely DOA. No community will coalesce around them, nobody will use them professionally, and their progenitors will get bored and move on almost immediately.

Guess we'll see!

Can’t argue with that.

Yes. None of these developers are seemingly as interested in the project as they are in the fiefdom. It’s a widespread problem in AI-driven development.

When everyone digs their own moat, you merely end up with a swamp. Tragedy of the commons, Internet edition .

Nobody really needs a perfect Photoshop clone, they need an image editor for their particular workflow. Photoshop excels, in a way, because it handle almost every potential workflow -- one product for many users.

But if I'm vibe-coding an app for myself, I only want it to what I want it to do. One product for one user.

What workflow do you have that no existing image editing application will suffice?

That's been the question running in my mind reading this thread. I'm wondering how many of these slimmed down custo versions are just some frontend written for ImageMagick.

That's probably asking too much of them. I assume they're mostly just frontends for Claude or some other LLM service and that every UI element just triggers a prompt that burns tokens or something.

I hate Photoshop's model as much as anyone but (pre-AI) solutions already exist which people already use.

So. I’m vibeslopping my photoshop too.

Not yet production ready although working pretty well.

I based it off babl, GEGL and MyPaint. It is binary compatible with gimp through xcf and also supports svg natively.

Since I’m a Mac user it uses metal rendering for speedy painting, gradient and filter previews, then commits changes through GEGL asynchronously. It does work quite neatly.

It already found a couple of bugs in GEGL and Gimp, which I have tucked in patches and tickets. My plan is to go through these manually and do contribute the fixes, if the community accepts them (and if they’re indeed problems) However I don’t think an LLM should send patches.

For me, I dont like photoshop and only have it to get lightroom so I can do basic editing on photos. I am in photoshop maybe 6 hours a year and only to do some minor edits or things I should probably do in another app like InDesign or whatever it is for layouts (I truly have no idea, but I'm not giving adobe more money).

For me, I just want to easily organize some folders, cull stuff, throw the culls into a marked directory, and process them to JPEG with some lighting adjustments since I shoot raw. Lightroom honestly is painful to use. I don't think gimp fills my needs since its more like photoshop. I'm happy to look at something else though!

Hopefully I'm not adding more fuel to your "Photoshop AI Slop" fire (which is well deserved), but take a look at redlamp.app - early days but may just become a viable LR alternative.

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