16 ms·

Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

• peab 5mo ago
  One of the bottlenecks right now is testing. The LLMs suck at testing still, so the feedback cycle still requires human input
  • imdsm 5mo ago
    That's because testing is a layer above, and that requires effort from people, and people don't want to put in the effort or lack the skills to properly test with them. I think LLMs are superb at testing, but I have a lot of machinery in front of them to enable it
    • throwaway2037 5mo ago
      > but I have a lot of machinery in front of them to enable it Can you share some details?
    • ponector 5mo ago
      LLMs are superb at testing easy things. Small website, simple lib, etc. Same way as LLMs cannot code anything complex, they cannot test complex scenarios.
      • falcor84 5mo ago
        Where is the "cannot" coming from? 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.
        • satisfice 5mo ago
          AI cannot take responsibility. It will not indemnify you. My decade is going just fine.
          • falcor84 5mo ago
            I don't get it. How is knowing that AI itself will not take responsibility or that it will not indemnify its users make your decade any better? Is your line of reasoning that using AI will very likely prove to be a bad idea in the long term and thus perfectly rational people with the same priors as yours will abstain from training or utilizing AI?
            • satisfice 5mo ago
              I am saying that AI cannot take responsibility. My line of reasoning assumes that you understand that responsibility/accountability is a crucial element in offering products and services in society. Although software companies like to disclaim all warranties to the extent the law allows, neither the market nor the FTC will allow you to breach contracts, make outrageous false claims, or offer products that destroy life and property. AI cannot and will not behave responsibly. I’m not opposed to AI, but I use it as a tool that I supervise. I review and test what it produces. People and companies that fail to do that will ruin their reputations, I predict.
              • falcor84 5mo ago
                Thanks for clarifying, I suppose I mostly agree, and also hope that misbehaving companies will be punished. With that said, I'm very concerned that the coming decade will be a bumpy ride for all of us.
        • ponector 5mo ago
          Where is the "can" coming from? We've seen failed attempts to persuade LLMs to crated a browser, a compiler.
          • 4mo ago
    • peab 5mo ago
      They're not good at testing things that require a high visual frame rate (i.e animations), high fidelity (small details), or are out of the normal distribution of things they've seen in the past (without comprehensive prompting)
• seltzerboys 5mo ago
  we're all just gonna skim over the fact that this blog is blatantly written by AI? is HN cool with that now
• worthless-trash 5mo ago
  Waiting for people vibe coding their own kernel, go on. Sending patches to an existing kernel is joining the dots, but do your own!
• itomato 5mo ago
  Why should there be? Why is this the measure of success?
• goldylochness 5mo ago
  why would anyone vibecode photoshop when AI already makes images
• philipp-gayret 5mo ago
  [dead]
• swiftcoder 5mo ago
  Not quite the direction I expected that to take, but I do agree with the broad strokes. LLMs lowering the cost of code isn't exactly solving software development, and is definitely not solving product development.
  • DeathArrow 5mo ago
    AI just frees us from always writing all the code ourselves. You still have to think at the architecture, and figure out what the product is and what features it should have.
  • pydry 5mo ago
    Except in a small minority of circumstances "lowering the cost of code" doesnt really help if the code which was lowered in cost was crap code. 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.
  • properbrew 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • rimliu 5mo ago
    Lowering the cost at subsidized pricing. For how long?
    • swiftcoder 5mo ago
      Honestly pretty hard to tell. We know that US firms are heavily subsidising their subscription pricing vs their per-token pricing, but we're much less clear to what extent the token prices themselves are subsidised, let alone whether the cheaper open-weights models coming out of Chinese firms are being subsidised (and to what end?).
• darkwi11ow 5mo ago
  See http//localhost:3000
• PunchTornado 5mo ago
  that's why I am doubling down on software stock.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• fugaziboutit 5mo ago
  I think it was in these forums where I first read that you can gauge AI progress by the velocity at which people move the goalposts.
  • sieiw 5mo ago
    Right. 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.
    • user34283 5mo ago
      Let's see at the end of the year how that went with the supposedly disappointing actual output and no layoffs.
      • grey-area 5mo ago
        Sure, let’s see. So far there is nothing to justify the hype, and there is a lot of money and hype around this, and a lot of fervent true believers.
        • user34283 5mo ago
          I am working like 20 hours a week on my new iOS app with Codex. People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI. Is it so hard to believe that agentic coding now works? Engineers are taking it up left and right. Edit with reply: I can't, because the app is still in the works. Also my HN account is again rate limited and I won't be able to post more comments. Edit number two to the other comment: It's not really that expensive. With Anthropic it would be $200, with Codex the $100 subscription is sufficient. It is interesting phrasing when you say that the providers "are making me think" the use of their service would be better, rather than me reaching this conclusion myself after using their services extensively for my work. And honestly, I think I've had it with HN. I can't even participate properly in the discussion, maybe because some moderator thought my comments and opinions unworthy again.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• roenxi 5mo ago
  The only people with higher expectations of the AI boom than the optimists are the pessimists. The forecasting I've seen [0] is that AI will be in a position to vibe-code things like Photoshop with some human assistance by around 2027-2030 if the current trends continue. Maybe fully autonomously in the mid 2030s depending on how many human-hours a basic clone of Photoshop takes to build. That might be a letdown for some. [0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... does nice charts
• jbellis 5mo ago
  https://archive.is/kO6Ph https://archive.is/kO6Ph
• techpression 5mo ago
  Same question I ask, it’s free money, why isn’t a million people asking Claude to build it? My guess is the lack of training data and understanding of the problems it solves, but AI was supposed to fix this already? 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.
• christkv 5mo ago
  Next twelve months will be interesting in software quality.
  • bayindirh 5mo ago
    The preliminary research have found a "downward pressure" in software quality, meaning AI assisted coding is already breaking things. I expect small firms to abandon updates altogether, re-writing the core parts of their code with prompts at every "update".
    • christkv 5mo ago
      It's fascinating to be down voted for this lol
      • bayindirh 5mo ago
        We normally don't talk about this much, it really degrades the quality of the discourse, but, all I can say is, sometimes these buttons are used under the influence of emotions, apparently.
• rq1 5mo ago
  Photoshop?! Where we’re going, we don’t need photoshop.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• jaspanglia 5mo ago
  Feels like AI skipped directly to coding and forgot the creative people who’ve been suffering with Photoshop layers for years
• charcircuit 5mo ago
  The biggest reason they don't exist is that you can buy them today. Why pay thousands of dollars and spend hundreds of hours to vibe code a photoshop when you can use the real, existing photoshop or one of its competitors immediately for a fraction of the price.
• ares623 5mo ago
  People are not upset because "Level 1" was taken away from them. 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.
  • b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
    learn to ~~code~~ weld.
    • bayindirh 5mo ago
      Which doesn't solve or invalidate any of the OP's points.
      • b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
        yes, I didn't feel like addressing the "point" that creatives are higher order beings that must be shielded from harm by everyone else. everyone else's jobs are being automated by machines and computers, outsourced to the third world, and undercut by legal and illegal immigrants. had been for decades. that was fine, this is fine also.
        • bayindirh 5mo ago
          Creatives are not higher order beings. They are human. The thing is, we shouldn't stone creatives for being vocal, instead we should join them and try to protect our dignity and human side rather than accepting what's being forced upon us. Being creative is a different mindset, and is very different from just sitting in front of a computer, bashing keys and doing well-defined things. In fact, high quality software engineering is a kind of creativity, too. Needs raw and real brain power, blood, sweat and tears to accomplish in a high quality manner. This is what enshittification of everything looks like. Belittling any human being trying to build something genuine with their sincere effort. Instead, we accept the whiplash. "More code, faster!", "Minimize time to market!", "Milk the user as much as you can, we need the monies!", "Masters demand growth, demand monies!". For what? We shall receive a liveable life. Instead we accept when the demand is collectively rowing boats as slaves, lulling ourselves "at least we are alive". Everything can be done in a better and dignified manner for all parties, but it doesn't generate money. The money you won't be able to spend, take to your next life, or afterlife for that manner.
• kingleopold 5mo ago
  can all of you say that competitor to photoshop made by AI native teams is impossible in 10 years?
  • bayindirh 5mo ago
    Yes, because UX is not an exact science. 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.
  • ares623 5mo ago
    it won't matter by then. There won't be any artists to use them!
  • rhplus 5mo ago
    The competitors to Photoshop right now are promoted image manipulation tools, not another menus-and-layers based Photoshop clone.
  • j16sdiz 5mo ago
    I think AI will do, like, 90% of them in 10 years. With the last 10% takes much longer (15? 20?). 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.
    • j16sdiz 5mo ago
      -- 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.
• cuechan 5mo ago
  I think they have a point. But the "QED" at the end leaves a cringe aftertaste
  • alex_smart 5mo ago
    Do they really? Do you genuinely that most people asking the "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" question are those who don't understand that "Level 2 and 3 activities" were the real bottleneck or are they trying to explain that to people who don't and are unreasonably expecting a 10x productivity boost out of them?
• walski 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• NotGMan 5mo ago
  His argument is the equivalent of saying in ~1910 when the 1st mass produced Ford car came out "Where are the carbon brakes? Where is the hybrid motor system? Where is the ABS? Where are the rear parking cameras"? Moving the goalpost.
• rixthefox 5mo ago
  I think one of the major reasons why it’s not here is because most AI tools are great for getting a prototype built up but undertaking a program like Photoshop which we can assume has a couple millions of lines of code is actually not easily replicable by vibe coding. 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.
• phone_book 5mo ago
  Second sentence form the article, "If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now." My answer: it is. Maybe we don't have a bunch of photo editing apps but it sure seems like we have a lot of vibe coded commercial and non-commercial projects being created. If i have to see one more vibe coded agent harness I might actually lose it. And I wouldn't call it all slop
• sinaatalay 5mo ago
  If Photoshop can be vibe coded in a couple of weeks, that's superintelligence. 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.
  • spwa4 5mo ago
    No it's not. The point is that if building software is indeed way cheaper now, then someone should be able to guide AI to build Photoshop, Linux, or Excel while providing direction, but having the billions of tokens of human intelligence now provided by AI. This is not happening.
    • sinaatalay 5mo ago
      This sounds to me like saying: "if poverty has decreased, everyone should be able to buy a 40m yacht." 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.
      • spwa4 5mo ago
        No, it sounds like saying "if poverty has decreased, I would expect the number of 40m yachts to double". I would expect Photoshop to get 5 new competitors. I get that my grandma would still not be able to do it. That, too, we're not seeing that at all.
  • cermicelli 5mo ago
• dude250711 5mo ago
  If the crap worked, they would not acquihire coder teams.
• wiether 5mo ago
  > 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. Actually where I get the most impressed working with AI is kind of at Level 3, where I ask for a feature and AI will suggest going further with it, or doing it in another, sometimes better, way. Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
• stevex 5mo ago
  I don't think that's the direction this is going to take. 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.
  • altmanaltman 5mo ago
    I don't think you understand Photoshop and its business if you think people are replacing it with ChatGPT or Gemini... the point of the article is that the whole "SaaS is dead and AI killed it" media narrative is bs propelled by the ai hype cycle.
    • decimalenough 5mo ago
      That's only half the author's point. The other half is that the "gate is where it always was" (= the part that's not just grinding out code to spec), and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.
      • ben_w 5mo ago
        Indeed. But: > the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless. I don't even think this "can't" is even a fact at this point. 24 years ago, my first major academic project, I wrote myself an image editor. In Visual Basic, because the teacher required it, and without version control because I hadn't heard of that when I was 18. It wasn't Photoshop, more like PaintShop Pro without the plugin support and instead with a bunch of baked-in effects, but the experience (and a later attempt to make it into a useful product) showed me how easy it was to separate concerns in that kind of app*, so I think it would be possible if anyone actually cared to try it. * for each document, you have a fairly simple data structure in the form of an array of layers/groups, each layer has masks etc., but mostly you're building out a huge number of other functions on that data; the hard parts are performance, which AI can also optimise; and that some of these (e.g. smart selection, content aware fill) need some kind of AI to be any good, which again AI can also now create the training system for. Even re-implementing a JPEG codec from scratch in a stupid language for the task wasn't too painful for me while I was still a university student, and I only did that because my REALBasic-on-a-PPC-mac setup at the time didn't allow me to use libjpeg like a sensible person. Of course, Adobe also has Creative Cloud and a search engine over stock photography, both of which are essentially entire projects in their own right, and I'd assume also integration with all their other apps. Proper vector fonts were also out of my scope; that and full backwards compatibility with PSD format, undocumented warts and all, would be my only real question for a vibe-coding attempt.
• dzonga 5mo ago
  where r the vibe coded "useful" apps. 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• xacky 5mo ago
  It could be said vibe coded competitors to any proprietary software. If everything proprietary was "forced open" by AI what would be the economic effects?
  • goldenarm 5mo ago
    We've had OSS equivalents of almost everything for decades, you can install a mature Slack clone for $0 since 2015. Yet people don't because of laziness and brands are strong.
    • esseph 5mo ago
      If there was a viable open source replacement for discord I would be using it today. Same goes for slack.
      • skydhash 5mo ago
        There’s zulip https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/
        • esseph 5mo ago
          That's a SaaS / Product. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/ https://zulip.com/self-hosting/ Similar to the GitLab model. Example limitations: > Mobile notifications without limitation for eligible communities > Mobile notifications for up to 10 users for other organizations
          • odo1242 5mo ago
            There’s also Mattermost
          • skydhash 5mo ago
            The app is open-source, so I guess it would be OK to deploy it yourself and thus register for your own notifications pipeline.
      • 5mo ago
• barrenko 5mo ago
  The Canva's "new" Affinity?
  • hootz 5mo ago
    Meh, they just merged existing software.
• hosaka 5mo ago
  I created Hosaka Studio using Claude Code. I wouldn't call it vibecoded however! I'm already a professional software dev and it was three months very hard work getting it to work properly across half a dozen different Linux distros, X11 and Wayland compositors (there's still a known issue on Nvidia+Cosmos). So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
• Gualdrapo 5mo ago
  Made me recall that meme about the frequency of miracles over history, saying that it plummeted with the invention of the camera, regained its momentum with Photoshop, and now they added a twist saying that miracles skyrocketed with the popularization of AI
• renegade-otter 5mo ago
  There are plenty of vibe-coded apps out there, I am sure. Mom and pop store fronts, "wellness trackers", todo managers - trivia of that sort. 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.
• themgt 5mo ago
  Service Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Performance art.
• darkwater 5mo ago
  I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post. The post author is calling out the "Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?" folks for empty accusations. The "accusers" in their post are THE people asking that question, not the AI users. 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
  • Retr0id 5mo ago
    Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made
    • stingraycharles 5mo ago
      People are making vibe accusations.
    • _aavaa_ 5mo ago
      [dead]
    • darkwi11ow 5mo ago
      This is what usually happens with LLM assisted writing. Looking at other posts in author blog, they are as well likely written with help and guidance of LLM bot, and also bring feeling of incoherence when read. I'd say this style predates LLM by millenia so it is not really invented by bots. To me it resembles the most the older religious texts and especially oral preaching. Some of attractors in current frontier models are likely coming from religious areas of knowledge, since this apocalyptic incoherence is found in so many texts today.
      • alex_smart 5mo ago
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• beklein 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• jbarrs 5mo ago
  >Where is... the vibecoded OS 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.
  • esseph 5mo ago
    > We already have three big desktop operating systems that cover 99% of use cases If we wanted to replace any of these operating systems in 10 years, or needed to, the best time to start would be now.
• danilocesar 5mo ago
  Well, not photoshop yet, but if you're in the scene of raw photo editing, you know there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising. 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.
  • throwaway2037 5mo ago
    > there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising. Can you share some links?
• TeMPOraL 5mo ago
  IDK, but I have three or four vibe-coded 0.1%-Photoshops already - small utility apps, all self-contained, client-side, static, zero build-step browser tools, each of them solving a very particular problem for me. 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.
  • eooekwe 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • lionkor 5mo ago
    And most importantly, you don't care at all if the tool you vibe-coded is any good. If you write at tool that converts an image to black & white, you are the kind of person who doesn't know or care what KIND of black&white it is. The fact that there are many algorithms to choose from would never cross your mind. 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".
    • Foobar8568 5mo ago
      Not really when I get up to 2-10 times the throughput of the state of art open-source library on their own benchmarks. And I don't have 10k -100k to blow on Nvidia cards nor to buy a few 100gb of RAM.
• pu_pe 5mo ago
  > There are levels in this work. Level 1 is the typing. Syntax, semicolons, the years memorizing pointer arithmetic and which header file the function lives in. Level 2 is the verifying. The harness. The test suite. The reflex of rejecting the ninety attempts that almost work and shipping the one that does. Level 3 is the deciding. What to build at all. Which architecture survives contact with the real world. (...) > 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.
  • falcor84 5mo ago
    Agreed. Very firmly in level 2, and going well into level 3 too. 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.
• tasoeur 5mo ago
  Maybe not photoshop but I’m building in the live VFX (visual effects) space, for example think touch designer or Houdini (but simpler). 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-editor-with-agentic-coding 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 https://sxp.studio/apps/subjectivezero
• michal_lola2 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• lifis 5mo ago
  AI is not yet at the superhuman stage where you can tell it "clone Photoshop" and get a perfect result within a day for almost free
• anticorporate 5mo ago
  That's a bit like asking "Where are the vibecoded AWSs?" or "Where are the vibe coded Office 365s?" 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.
  • FailMore 5mo ago
    I've been experimenting with a fairly vibecoded Office 365..., but rooted in the world of vibe (an advanced Markdown reader which can do complex things like render charts and mermaid diagrams, see: https://sdocs.dev https://sdocs.dev, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=charts https://sdocs.dev/#sec=charts, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=diagrams https://sdocs.dev/#sec=diagrams). Slides coming soon too... But this is very much a subsection of the full Office suite. (Also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633)
  • alwillis 5mo ago
    If I wanted to vibe code something like Photoshop, I would start with the source code for version 1.0 [1]. 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/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...
    • anticorporate 4mo ago
• BoredPositron 5mo ago
  [dead]
• cold_harbor 5mo ago
  the bottleneck is precise control. diffusion models are great at generation but bad at 'change only this region, preserve everything else exactly' — that constraint keeps Photoshop alive.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• traceroute66 5mo ago
  There will never be a vibecoded Photoshop. 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.
• plaidfuji 5mo ago
  If I’m understanding this correctly, it starts by raising this question, then argues that it’s kind of a cheap and meaningless punch-down. 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.
  • layer8 5mo ago
    > definitely not written by an LLM Are you serious?
    • plaidfuji 5mo ago
      This comment couldn’t be more ironic given the content of the post
  • alex_smart 5mo ago
    > If I’m understanding this correctly 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.
• GistNoesis 5mo ago
  The vibecoded OS builder (by yours truly) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167846 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 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.
• Hard_Space 5mo ago
  I need Photoshop for an almost vanishingly small subset of all the things it is capable of, and this holds true for nearly all 'full-fledged' software that I use. So what may not be surfacing, in the absence of vibe-coded Photoshops, is the growing local script collections of many users. 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.
  • carlosjobim 5mo ago
    There are no downsides for the customer if the software is much more capable than what the user needs. So there's not much of a business case for offering software with less features.
    • marking-time 5mo ago
      The use case for less capable software is that it is cheaper. Why buy a mansion when all you need is a bedroom?
      • carlosjobim 5mo ago
        Because fully fledged software is dirt cheap already. Even Photoshop is only $20 per month. That is nothing to a professional who needs the tool. People who care about that kind of money will never pay any money at all for software, they will look for something for free.
        • bensyverson 5mo ago
          The very real alternative now is: $0 to custom-code the one workflow you need, then $0 to fix it in four years when the dependencies break. Don't get me wrong. If you need PS, you need PS. I have a neighbor who is a photo retoucher. She is not vibe coding the tool she spends 8+ hr/day in.
• deepsummer 5mo ago
  I think it is too early to answer that question. If I really wanted to, I could 'vibe code' Photoshop. But my estimate is that it would take me 2 years, as a solo dev. And by 'vibe code' I mean not write a single line by hand - I would still define and specify an outline for important data structures and algorithms. And then work through the system feature by feature, with many prompts needed for each feature, until it is perfect. It is much faster than coding by hand, but still a lot of work. 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.
• fstepho 5mo ago
  FYI Looks like the site is down, the link is returning a 503 Service Unavailable. Probably victim of its own success.
• pbiggar 5mo ago
  They mention Vibecoded compiler, here is one: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/full-optimizing-compiler-with-ai/ https://blog.paulbiggar.com/full-optimizing-compiler-with-ai.... I continue to work on it in some limited spare time, but it continues well. I'm currently working on building an orchestrator to continue building it, as babysitting the AI still takes a lot of time. Need to figure out how to put the strategic direction into that though.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
  "If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now" 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.
  • Gigachad 5mo ago
    Yes, we are drowning in slop, while also still paying for all the same tools we did pre AI because the vibeslop doesn't cut it.
    • theshrike79 5mo ago
      We are drowning in slop because people (usually Americans) want to make everything into a damn community or product. Vibe all you want, use it for yourself. Not every brain fart program has to be a "startup" you are the "CEO" of.
• mft_ 5mo ago
  What we desperately need is a (vibe-coded or otherwise) modern office suite. I maintain that this is the single biggest factor holding back widespread Linux adoption today, especially for businesses. 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.
• 0gs 5mo ago
  lol Stuart Semple has been trying to build one he kickstartered for like 2 years. i think the last status update said he got the lasso working
• vga1 5mo ago
  Same answer as to the question "Where are all the better versions of Photoshop?" before LLMs were a thing. Everybody (not actually everybody) has wanted one for 20+ years, and almost nobody made it.
• ChickeNES 5mo ago
  > the vibecoded OS What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?
• francisofascii 5mo ago
  Who needs a Vibecoded photoshop when you can simply ask for the image that you need. And that is my fear for many other types of applications. We won't need an application at all.
  • self_awareness 5mo ago
    Well, you'll still need an application to write a prompt in. And to send the prompt to an LLM. And to run an LLM. And hundreds of apps to manage the complexity of the data center. 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.
• desdenova 5mo ago
  Wtf did I just read? 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.
• satisfice 5mo ago
  The author of this post seems to have left something out. He never clearly states his thesis. 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.)
• deleted 5mo ago
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• Havoc 5mo ago
  Articles like this where the author argues all sides in some sort of steelmaning attempt and listing also sorts of arguments that they’re not making on behalf of some third party or whatever are so frustrating. Genuinely hard to tell what the author is trying to say in the maze of imagined third party accusers and listings of things they’re not saying
• fatih-erikli-cg 5mo ago
  [dead]
• d1l 5mo ago
  I didn’t follow the article’s thesis. It felt written from a defensive crouch and claimed not to be punching down but it seemed to be radiating hostility the entire time. Something about vibe coding only replaces the lowest level of mechanical work involved in creative pursuits (including coding)? 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.
• armada1122 5mo ago
  I’d like to share my thoughts as someone who uses Python and Claude Code on a daily basis (I’ve been running a research codebase and trading bot for several months). 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.
• intended 5mo ago
  The analogies of this moment - 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.
• TrackerFF 5mo ago
  I'd say that the main challenge for vibe-cloning big and known programs comes down to cost. Plenty of extremely competent devs and companies out there are porting FOSS programs from one language to another, while offloading all the heavy lifting to the AI models - but even then, it can cost a non-trivial amount of money, and we're still talking about programs which are 1/10th in size of the ones you've mentioned. 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.
  • _aavaa_ 5mo ago
    Because a small fortune with AI is smalller than the massive fortune and a team it would have required before AI. You can trivially modulate your burn rate with AI, you can’t really slow down development once you have a team you need to pay.
• self_awareness 5mo ago
  We don't have vibecoded Photoshop, but... I have a vibecoded hexeditor. Vibecoded debugger. Vibecoded small document writer. Vibecoded file browser. Vibecoded virtualization runner on macOS. All for my personal usage and not released anywhere. Why would I release it? Everyone can vibecode their own.
• luodaint 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • yellow_lead 5mo ago
    > Vibecoded Photoshop exists > wine tracking app I referenced above is one of them. All it needs is an expert in the field who knows the constraint model. Uh, where? > The reason we don't have a vibecoded Photoshop Clanker
• reptilian 5mo ago
  Before vibe coding, this Legend built a free, open, web based Photoshop. It's called photopea.com. best alternative there is
  • jofzar 5mo ago
    lmao you and me came in and said the same thing, its like slopshop doesn't need to exist because photopea exists.
• jofzar 5mo ago
  Im suprised no one has said its because photopea exists? 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. https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
  • hammeiam 5mo ago
    Photopea is such an amazing project. Pre-AI solo dev, too.
• panny 5mo ago
  >I feel sorry for everyone who is solely operating at Level 1 and with nothing left to contribute. 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.
• recsv-heredoc 5mo ago
  Maybe that's not how it's being used though - Nobody needs photoshop to solve a specific focused problem. 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.
• nayroclade 5mo ago
  30 seconds searching GitHub turned up this: https://github.com/limpy183-dev/Photoshop-clone https://github.com/limpy183-dev/Photoshop-clone
• andrewstuart 5mo ago
  This is a now classic anti AI argument. “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.
• diego_moita 5mo ago
  > Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops? 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.
• nkoren 5mo ago
  For the past 18 months, I've been creating an in-house GUI application which is starting to approaching Photoshop-level complexity. By which I mean: it's still probably a solid order of magnitude less complex than Photoshop -- but it's not two orders of magnitude less complex. It's several orders of magnitude more complex than the examples of vibecoded apps I typically see. (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.
• j_w 5mo ago
  The blog post is weird. It feels like shadowboxing. "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.
  • Aeolun 5mo ago
    > 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? Because selling shovels is a guaranteed way to earn you money, unlike digging for gold.
    • j_w 5mo ago
      But that is part of the point of the argument which the author is shadowboxing against. If LLM sellers are shovel sellers, does that not make you suspicious when they are the ones telling you that there is gold in the hills?
• jadar 5mo ago
  This doesn’t seem serious. “Two years of access” when the models and harnesses just got good last November. It also requires people to want to spend the time and tokens to build something for which we already have free alternatives (which are good!) like the GIMP. People are building projects that are important and unique to them, not hypothetical complex software for the fun of it.
• stared 5mo ago
  Speaking of vibecoding photo edition, I dream of an extensible, open-source photo manager and editor. Think: VSCode for images. So that it would be easily to add functionalities with plugins - for file reading, oganization, edit, and everything.
• phendrenad2 5mo ago
  Adobe will lay off most of its workforce and lower the price of photoshop. Bold prediction, I know. But when it happens, it'll be because they are threatened by a thousand "vibe-coded" photoshops that do the one thing people need in the moment (the "slop" the author mentions).
• mb_thd 5mo ago
  > WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME? The author seems unwell
• bronlund 5mo ago
  Why would I use AI to recreate a tool that AI obviates? It's like trying to prove that calculators are a scam by pointing out that no one has used one to build a better abacus.
• dnautics 5mo ago
  Photoshop is a kitchen sink. 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• aframemodular 5mo ago
  Next article idea for you: If modern heavy machinery is so good, why has no one vibe-constructed Notre Dame. Maybe we need to go back to hand shovel and toss out our earthmovers.
• josser 5mo ago
  I occasionally experiment by asking it to write a simple app that can help me count claps using some signal-processing methods (FFT, cross-correlation, MFCC). 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.
• egypturnash 5mo ago
  Judging by my glimpses inside Adobe, the vibecoded Photoshop is Photoshop.
• erelong 5mo ago
  I think it's an interesting conversation; there's an assumption that "vibe coding is complete and incapable of creating Photoshop alternatives". 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).
  • varispeed 5mo ago
    Isn't it more like why would you want to vibe code Photoshop? 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.
  • seemaze 5mo ago
    Where are the vibe coded Photoshops? Here is a good place to start: https://github.com/light-and-ray/awesome-alternative-uis-for-comfyui 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.
• butz 5mo ago
  Just hold your horses, I started vibe coding not only Photoshop, but whole Creative Suite with all the utilities. Sorry to say, but I ran out of tokens this month, so it might take a while until I will be able to take on Adobe. Just sit tight and send positive vibes my way.
• xnx 5mo ago
  This is a bit like asking, "If engines are so good, where are all the mechanical oxen?" 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/ https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation/)
• orochi235 5mo ago
  I'm two weeks into a vibecoded Illustrator, actually (https://orochi235.github.io/weasel/swillustrator https://orochi235.github.io/weasel/swillustrator). It's built on top of a more generic WebGL presentation layer for canvas-based apps in general and Illustrator seemed like a fun test case. That said, I would think anybody who actually tried to use it for real work was an idiot. There are decades of convention and tweaks and learned lessons built into an app like Illustrator. It's kind of shocking how well Claude knows its intricacies, but even then, replicating them all would take a very long time. Also it's incredibly busted and full of bugs and I'm out of GitHub CI minutes for the month. :( 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-horizons/ 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.
• joshmarinacci 5mo ago
  I’ve been vibe coding a Figma like clone and it’s fun but slow going. Creating real Photoshop clones is still a ton of work with no monetary payoff.
• tedggh 5mo ago
  Photopea was a solo attempt to offer a free alternative to Photoshop, and it was highly successful. If the original creator had access to Claude Code back in the day, it is very likely he would have vibecoded the entire thing. So it’s not like the tools are incapable of cloning Photoshop, but it would still require a lot of human effort, more than what the average person would like to invest.
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• giorgioz 5mo ago
  Even before vibe coding I was already using this Photoshop copycat as webapp: https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
• potsandpans 5mo ago
  What the author is missing is that the world is swimming with single purpose apps that don't need to be published. 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.
• macwhisperer 5mo ago
  at this point I trust software companies less and less.. 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..
• pancsta 5mo ago
  Vibecoding is for scripting, and scripting != software. Not to be confused with cross-language codebase translations.
• gizmo64k 5mo ago
  [dead]
• jpsimons 4mo ago
  Not vibe coded exactly, but certainly AI assisted: https://mojavepaint.app https://mojavepaint.app