> Is an open-source vibe-coded creative suite really worth cheering on?
No. They suck the oxygen out of the open-source ecosystem for other more credible software, such as Photopea or Gimp or FreeCAD.
No. They suck the oxygen out of the open-source ecosystem for other more credible software, such as Photopea or Gimp or FreeCAD.
I'd like to see how far echelon takes it. The current iteration is somewhat unusable, but there's room given weeks and enough tokens to get this into a usable state, and I'm interested in nuking the entire Adobe business model from orbit.
And haven't we had enough decades for GIMP to get air? I'm actually a big fan of it and it's my primary image editor, but the amount of hate it gets on this and other sites is incredible. Everybody just complains that they want it to work like Photoshop, and now a guy is making that real and we say it's taking energy away from GIMP. That doesn't track for me.
This will be the real test. I am an amateur, who needed some sprite editing, video edits and music changes. And I didn't use artcraft ( I might now though ) -- I vibe coded my own ( which brings me to another the other part upper echelon may be slowly realizing: they are not needed ).
It's almost like Hacker News is a giant group of people, and different subsets of people comment on different subsets of articles (aka, the Goomba Fallacy).
Fascinating, I didn't know one of our resident "IDEs are obsolete and I never use them" commenters was demonstrating the complete uselessness of their mindset in production! Usually the vibe coders are cagey and never share their amazing 10x applications. Now we see why.
> but there's room given weeks and enough tokens to get this into a usable state,
There really isn't. I've certainly been down this road trying to understand the hype. The more complex the application gets the more the models will buckle under not having a solid foundation to work from, applying hacky patch after hacky patch. Simple changes will take 30 minutes, break three other things because the tests they write are trash, and introduce new edge case bugs. We've been hearing about how software development is over with every model release for the past two years, with the biggest upswing being since last Nov, and we're still hearing "just a couple of more weeks". When do we face reality?
I really do wonder what will happen, is there any chance they manage to adapt instead of disappear? They can definitely afford more tokens than any random open source project, so maybe they'll have to expand their offering and reduce their prices, but that would probably only kick the can further down the road, and that's just Adobe, what about even more expensive software like Solidworks or Ansys?
For example, I love GIMP but holy shit it was a downgrade from Adobe in most ways.GIMP should stay GIMP, though, I wouldn't want my tools being completely overhauled in terms of UI and workflow anyways. I'm sure the old heads who put TLC into it would be strongly against someone using AI to significantly rewrite it at base, but also changing the interface and how it works significantly enough to matter to users. It's a sad way how it's been gone about, but in a sense this new software is building on GIMP (among many, many others) shoulders by developing openly and allowing the lessons on how to do things be adopted and not re-learned.
I find such vibe-coded efforts to resonate with me, because they reflect the same impatience I have. Impatience with enshittification of the commercial offerings, impatience with OSS following suit without realizing it (most modern UI/UX philosophy is driven by needs of enshittification), impatience with OSS being dominated by fakers and itself becoming a business model. Impatience with broken software.
Vibe-coding can be a way to vent the frustration, and in this case, it even turns into a spectator sport. Most of the vibe-coded projects I do, and that I see people I know doing, share the same, single, deep motivation - "I want a software that does this particular thing right now, and without all the bullshit". The vibe is that of awe, but it starts rooted in anger.