Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones

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.

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 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.

Felt like that undermined some of the more cogent points the article was making.

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.

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.

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.

I also feel demotivated by these clones. It devalues the legitmate pursuit of building creative apps to compete with the current standards.

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 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?

And those numbers for the cost of a clone are really, really small, not impressive in the way the author thinks they are.

Adobe is just going to have to start working for a living again.

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

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.

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

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

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, or missing filters isn't going to be hard to fix even without AI, 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.

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 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.

Thing is, Claude tokens are subsidized, to the tune of 50x. You can’t judge by API pricing.

> 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.

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.

I thought the clones were open source

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177228 - (Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?)

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.

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.

Come on. Is this really necessary?

Innovation in Adobe products? Really? I mean, really? Are you serious?

And the main argument is performance on high resolution?

> 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.

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/)

It's just a matter of time, AI will build the PS engine better. (in rust obviously)

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.

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

From 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.

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.

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.

LLMs remain a microwave.

> 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.

> 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.