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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 pos

• 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.
      • hilariously 5mo ago
        I think its also possible, but non-technical people likely wont hill climb high enough to make this unless they are extremely motivated. Using abstraction properly to effect change, understanding breaking down the problem to extreme details and building them back up one by one. I think most of the people using AI for one shot type of things don't even know what "content aware fill" is even if they used it.
      • altmanaltman 5mo ago
        Most vibecoders say their stack is "cursor". Reread your comment and then try to guess if a vibecoder could even understand what you talked about let alone execute it in a pefect and reliable manner. Vibecoding is about dopamine hits, people give up if it doesn't work on first 2-3 attempts.
    • le-mark 5mo ago
      > and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless. A lot of ai hype IS premised on ai being able to vibecode photoshop.
      • signatoremo 5mo ago
        I never heard of it, let alone "a lot". Care to give examples?
  • augment_me 5mo ago
    And the point of the comment you are answering is that the market you are talking about has taken on a different form. The difference is that normally, people would perhaps pay a company to buy a PS license, or pay a professional to edit their images, however now this market segment will just use VLMs to edit the image to what they need.
    • vidarh 5mo ago
      It goes beyond that. It's becoming cheaper and easier to e.g. vibecode tools to carry out the handful of uses lower end users may have for PS. Some users will do that directly. Some users will turn that into services or apps. PS will be weakened by thousands of small cuts, not one large vibecoded abomination. Some of those tools will use VLMs to provide more advanced features instead of implementing it themselves, making competing for a broader subset of users feasible.
    • netdevphoenix 5mo ago
      What is "VLM"?
      • ses1984 5mo ago
        Very large models that aren’t large language models.
      • famouswaffles 5mo ago
        Vision Language Models
  • __alexs 5mo ago
    Photoshop (and many traditional SaaS products) solve hundreds of different use cases. Most users probably only care about a handful of them. You don't need to do every use case to kill SaaS if you have a tool that can allow users to solve their 2-3 use cases on their own with custom tooling.
  • carlosjobim 5mo ago
    1. Adobe sells Photoshop to design professionals. 2. Design professionals sell their work to businesses. But if businesses start using AI image editing instead of contracting professionals, then Adobe won't have a market of Photoshop buyers. Before you say that AI isn't good enough for the kind of business which pays for professional design, in one year it probably will be.
    • altmanaltman 5mo ago
      Its not about AI being good enough. Businesses outsource these things because they don't want to deal with it. That's the same now. The question is if designers are using AI or not. And guess who has the best AI stack for designers? Photoshop with Firefly. This is why I insuniated that people here don't really understand photoshop as a business and customer, only see it as an app. And yeah, it will be better in one year but so will Adobe's inbuilt AI tools. We have not seen designers abandon Adobe for AI and i am willing to bet that wont be true, not even in this decade.
      • carlosjobim 5mo ago
        You're making really good points.
• ben_w 5mo ago
  > 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. As per https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/, I suspect many people are doing this and the artists hate all the examples even more than the average consumer who simply treats it as a sign of low-budget work. My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror. Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-photo-czech-advertisement https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p... That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
  • ACCount37 5mo ago
    The recent ChatGPT Images 2.0 has awe-inspiring image editing and composition capabilities. I can totally see what people mean when they say "Photoshop killer".
    • koonsolo 5mo ago
      Same experience on my end. It's crazy what the latest version can pull off, with reference images, text, etc.
      • rimliu 5mo ago
        so both of you do not understand what Photoshop is really used for.
        • 5mo ago
• sitkack 5mo ago
  So it is the AI image workbench tools like ComfyUI.
• PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  I don't think many people subscribe to photoshop for just occasional image edits. It's very much a tool mostly used by professionals that do a lot of it
  • embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Back in the day when a license was expensive, then yes, you either were a professional who used it a lot, or like the rest of us poors, you used a cracked copy. Nowadays though, with relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
    • visarga 5mo ago
      Because of that I never touched Photoshop in 25 years, since PS6 I think. I rarely need to edit images, and when I do I regret the app I once had. There's no free tier or something that makes sense for my needs. I use Gimp but its UI does not feel right.
    • jaffa2 5mo ago
      > relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, Sorry what? This is nonsense. > as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already. ahh there's the rub. So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it. So what about the folk who don't use it professionally and have no access to cracked copies anymore ?
      • leviathant 5mo ago
        I'm paying $16/mo for Photoshop and Lightroom. I have to imagine that the majority of people who post to HN can afford $16/mo. I'm not a professional photographer, but it's an excellent hobby, and just the other week, a neighbor stopped me to tell me how much they love the pictures I post to our neighborhood Facebook group - so that's something I guess!
• deleted 5mo ago
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• bradley13 5mo ago
  Exactly this. I have an acquaintence who is a wine connoisseur and collector. He has done technical project management, but does not program himself. Over the course of several months, he has produced an app that manages a database of the wines he has. It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional. This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.
  • fnwbr 5mo ago
    what about the data? is it locally hosted? if he drops his phone everything will be lost? or are servers and databases involved? if so, where are they being hosted? how did he manage those? even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.
    • deleted 5mo ago
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    • deleted 5mo ago
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    • dhdaadhd 5mo ago
      The stack is typically some combination of supabase and vercel (think: managed everything), which get you far enough on a free plan if you have 1 user
    • hombre_fatal 5mo ago
      If someone has any curiosity, they can ask the AI about this and it will engineer a solution, like use iCloud or some free tier service. After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.
• datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
  So LLMs are the 3d printers of software. Great for niche use-cases without enough market demand for a proper solution, and generally scale very poorly vs proper industrial processes.
  • swader999 5mo ago
    I think your last half remains to be determined.
    • datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
      The preponderance of evidence to date would point to systems engineered by meatbags are of a significantly higher quality than vibe coded ones. My use of the word “system” is very intentional vs. something less qualifying like “program”. Edit to add: my take is proper system engineering and design basically requires general intelligence, so the bar for LLMs to reliably produce high quality systems is AGI.
      • visarga 5mo ago
        It's no longer a choice. The AI is already causing changes in how competition, investors and users behave.
        • datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
          This seems to be a non-sequitur, did you respond to the wrong comment? And investors are famously stupid on aggregate, so I wouldn’t trust their judgment in terms of predicting the future of systems engineering.
  • basisword 5mo ago
    The big difference from 3D printers is that there is zero upfront investment required. The number of non-technical people I've seen making simple tools/scripts to automate bits of their workflow is astonishing. Costs them nothing to at least try it out.
• maptime 5mo ago
  We saw this happening for our SAAS stack we used, why pay for a massive SAAS tool with a huge surface area when we only used the desk+room booking and payment. Before building something like this was such a huge cost now it's becoming palatable
• pbalau 5mo ago
  Why do you need the AI to write a script? Why not have the AI do the work without a "script"?
  • hilariously 5mo ago
    Because then you have chosen a non-deterministic action when a deterministic action would do, thus making it more expensive, more prone to failure, and just more annoying to use. Would you rather press a button and go through a simple process that's normalized across all crud apps or talk to a chatbot every time you want to solve a problem and invoke external apis?
    • zahlman 5mo ago
      Do keep in mind, the user has to be someone who can conceive of the idea of having a script instead of just having the job done, and also needs to have some semblance of understanding how to run it.
  • ses1984 5mo ago
    A script will last forever, and doesn’t cost tokens to run.
• sreekanth850 5mo ago
  Those were never the users of photoshp. I guess canva will get a big hit due to this.
• netdevphoenix 5mo ago
  Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI. No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs. What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items. Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer. Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose. Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.
  • flohofwoe 5mo ago
    I have my doubts, yes there will be tinkerers who build their own apps, but this will be roughly the same crowd who today tinker with home automation, soldering or model trains as a hobby (or as Douglas Adams said: "I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand" - just replace "programming" with "vibecoding"). I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.
    • goolz 5mo ago
      Ya I wholly agree. The barrier to entry for new SaaS products also got really low for the KPMG-backed PE darlings of the world.
    • Klathmon 5mo ago
      > I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays. If you think of apps in the traditional sense I think I agree with you, but I have a feeling things are about to become a lot more messy. Grandma might not even know she's building her own calendar app. I don't think we are that far from being able to ask a general purpose AI to "help me not forget my family's birthdays" and it creating and maintaining code for that purpose. Not quite an app, but more than a one off script, I think AIs are going to unlock this weird situation where they're running a bunch of barely organized code almost as an extension of thinking.
• visarga 5mo ago
  > How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? Lately ChatGPT can generate complex diagrams with lots of text so I used them to make slides.
  • rimliu 5mo ago
    Photoshop is a wrong tool for diagrams.
• Unicironic 5mo ago
  I absolutely agree with this. As someone that used to use Photoshop a lot when I was younger, But now just have a few niche use cases for it, I instead vibe-coded image editing for our blog posts exactly the way we need it. The I.e proper dimensions proper cropping, automatically generated. SEO friendly slug, etc. Sure, it's only about 1% of what Photoshop can do if that, but the reality is that unless you're a graphic designer, that's not what you need it for in your workflow anyways. AI allows you to just have a custom workflow without having to buy these massive tools that were built for a million use cases
• stellamariesays 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• arscan 5mo ago
  Applications like Photoshop will one day be regarded as the castles of this era. Technically impressive, but economically/politically irrelevant. While they could be reproduced at a fraction of the cost there just isn’t any point to it because there are much better ways to allocate capital.
• giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  > 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. This is also probably why nobody is vibecoding photoshop, why bother when a model can do it?
• haritha-j 5mo ago
  Background removal. that's the main thing i used photoshop for. Last week I noticed that there's an AI version now built into microsoft powerpoint. I have almost no use for photoshop now.
• miltonlost 5mo ago
  > 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 And often from data it makes up!
• beej71 5mo ago
  I think there's some low-hanging money to be made with a nearly-feature-complete PS clone.
  • fragmede 5mo ago
    Where's the market for that though? You're trying to capture the crowd for whom Photoshop via creative cloud is too expensive, so you have to charge less than that, but there's already a couple of open source programs that do some amount of image editing for free, so you'd have to be really near feature complete for your PS clone, which is a lot of tokens that could be used to fork those open source programs and make them better, rather than start from scratch.
    • beej71 5mo ago
      I think if a good PS clone existed, Adobe wouldn't be selling so many subs. And yeah, undercut the hell out of it... How much does it cost in tokens to make the replacement?
      • fragmede 5mo ago
        Give Claude the goal of taking Gimp but make it more usable, and change the name.
  • kjkjadksj 5mo ago
    Your competition, gimp, is free already.
    • bensyverson 5mo ago
      Not to mention Photopea [0] [0]: https://www.photopea.com
      • doubled112 5mo ago
        The Affinity suite is also free now https://www.affinity.studio/ https://www.affinity.studio/
• MattRogish 5mo ago
  Yes, absolutely. People keep confusing single player vs. multiplayer and forgetting "jobs to be done". Photoshop files are the lingua franca of the design world. If you're working with designers, they'll likely give you a PSD (replace PSD with other examples in other domains, etc.) Sure, I could vibe code "make a tool that lets me create multi-layered canvasses etc." but if I want to use it with anyone other than me, I have to make sure that it's binary compatible, bit for bit, with PSDs (or whatever's required to open it in Photoshop and maintain the layers). This makes no sense to do this unless I'm targeting Photoshop specifically and plenty of tools already do this. Other than a way to burn money, I am completely unsurprised such a thing isn't widely available (I'm sure someone, somewhere is/has tried this). For most people, single-player Photoshop is a means to an end. If I have sufficiently advanced AI I can just describe what I want and get the end result (a button, image, whatever). Or even just point it at an image and say "add gaussian blur here". I would never try and vibe-code a new editor just to make images.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• concinds 5mo ago
  Yeah, the pain/reward ratio is against vibecoded replacements for mature tools. Piracy is cheaper than tokens. But over the next 5 years I expect a growth in Blender-like open-source projects aiming to take on the big closed-source elephants. Code is cheaper now. The main downside of LLM coding, unmaintainable spaghetti code, can be mitigated effectively with discipline and coordination. You still need maintainers to uphold contribution standards, but people will throw tokens at you. A small, disciplined team can go a long way, make a decent enough product, and then attract the institutional money (like Blender did) and hit that growth curve where everyone rallies you and you've won. Lots of companies would have a vested interest in reducing these dependencies to Adobe et al., or have a more customizable product. Competitive professional tools, more like Blender and less like GIMP, but in other areas, like DAWs, CADs, and others.
• submeta 5mo ago
  100%. This is what’s happening with agentic coding. We develop individual solutions tailored to our needs. We don’t need one-stop shops anymore. For instance I have created a snippet manager, because I didn’t like the one in Raycast. Or I have created a journal viewer because the daily notes in Obsidian are not easily viewed across days. And so I have dozens of smaller solutions that are tailored to my needs. And I am guessing lots of vibe coders do the same.
• JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  That sounds correct to me. I vibe-coded an app that creates a stereo pair from .mpo files for viewing on an antique stereoscope [1]. Is there anything more niche than that? [1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer
• sillyfluke 5mo ago
  This is such a bizarre misrepresentation of the author's point that I have to assume in good faith that it's based on a misreading of the post. Otherwise, you are unintentionally proving the author's point by describing (now) trivial uses of AI as some sort of counterpoint, or simply making an unrelated point that doesn't have anything to do with the author's main argument. The author's point is not specifically about Photoshop. It's right there in the second paragraph: >Where is the vibecoded Photoshop. The vibecoded Excel. The vibecoded Maya. The vibecoded Blender. The vibecoded compiler that compiles itself. The vibecoded database, the vibecoded OS, the vibecoded anything-that-requires-architectural-judgment-to-hold-together What do all these examples have in common, besides requiring "architectural judgment-to-hold-together"? They are software created by mid-large companies or organizations with a large of numbers of contributors. It's not about Photoshop, it's about developing complex software with high quality control and a continuous mature and continuous release cycle to a demanding set of hundreds/thousands of users. So to take that it in and then say, "Well, I don't think AI going to be used fo build that stuff, it's going to be directly used by non-technical end users to bypass existing more complex legacy software like Excel," is only proving the author's point. Cause at the end of the day, what are all these companies "token-maxxing" actually building and selling to their customers? That's the larger point the author is making. Just as you imply, a large swath of apps and SaaS are being wiped out by end-users directly using AI. So the only viable path is to raise the bar on what is being built. Someone should be vibecodinfg a phone OS and vibe-building an actual phone alternative to Android and iOS, if it's actually possible. Someone should be vibecoding the Metaverse and vibecoding hundreds of Apple Vision Pro apps to make VR/AR actually viable (again). And on and on. The only honest counterpoint to the author's post, unless you can cite vibecoded software at the level of scale and maturity they are seeking, should be: Yeah, 2026 was the year the coding performance of LLMs passed a certain maturity threshold adoption-wise so we should realistically give it a few more years to see if it is actually possible to vibecode continuously released ambitious complex software used by demanding users on the scale you mention.
• m463 5mo ago
  Yeah, you can use some ai models to completely reinterpret your photos with different styles, or just skip the "having your photos" as a source in the first place and generate them synthetically.