Vibecoding Photoshop: Time and pressure

By the way, PhotoSuite is just a stolen copy of my project www.photopea.com , which I have been working on for 8 hours a day for the past ... 14 years? :D

It was discussed here on HN yesterday and then, the anonymous person behind it removed the "Issues" section completely from their Github

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730

https://replayweb.page/?source=https://archive.org/cors/gith...

The thing is: there are color spaces, correct filtering etc, etc.

Sure you can do a Photoshop clone as in "Ps in 1990" if you just ask an LLM because then (and for years after) Ps itself got all this stuff wrong and people used it, professionally nevertheless.

But getting these things right requires, as-always, in-depth understanding of the theory behind it or the LLMs will gladly omit those parts.

Not least because the majority of OSS code dealing with those things gets it subtly wrong.

A good start is btw. to ask your agent of choice to copy all theory/basics from OpenImageIO.

How do I know? I'm maintaining a closed-source, heavily LLM-assisted Rust crate that is the backbone of all image processing we do at my employer (kringers fossed it will be OSS eventually).

The amount of subtly-wrong- bites-you-eventually bugs I fixed (or had an agent fix, rather), despite tight specs and good tests, over the last 10 months, is ... noteworthy.

That said, for a lot of users it probably doesn't matter if interpolating between red and green means getting a muddy brown or that you get subtely wrong colors when you downsample and some (or quite a bit ) of aliasing when you do so more than 2× etc.

But while a lot of people want to prompt a clone of app X and an unexpected many also seem to have the patience for it: few have the background to get sth. out of that endeavour that will be genuinely useful in the end.

The CAD/parametric 3D modeling segment is another category I'm watching closely where a lot of people have the same issue w/o (yet) realizing.

And ofc, there are always exceptions where seemingly someone is behind the project who actually do know what they're doing. :)

I think people aren't thinking enough about the second-order effects of this.

The immediate reaction is to ask whether any of these would be good enough to replace Photoshop (or Pixelmator or whatever). That's a first-order question and it's an open one --- you probably couldn't replace a real workflow with vibe Photoshop today, but I wouldn't bet against that being the case a year from now.

But the second-order questions include consideration of the people who can't use Photoshop, either because of cost or (to me, more importantly) because of lack of platform support.

In a world where 90% of the functionality of things like Photoshop and Word are replaceable with personal apps, how much does platform support matter anymore? How much do platforms matter anymore? I'm a committed macOS user and have been since the TiBook. Will I be 5 years from now? I'm deeply uncertain, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that if I'm not a macOS user, I also won't be a Windows or Linux user.

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

I'll stick to gimp I guess.

For people interested in a Photoshop clone, https://www.photopea.com/ was amazing long before LLMs existed. It runs in the browser and was built by a single person!

One not mentioned in the article, but being built by someone I know is https://schist.app/

Photoshop is currently offered for $260+ per year, hard to imagine a world where this stays the same 12 months from now.

I’m vibecoding an excel in rust, for roughly the same reason in this post: what can’t be done, what are the limits.

https://github.com/scosman/freecell

So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.

I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.

It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already and engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good.

>If anyone can now vibecode their own software, why haven’t we seen any viable replacements

Then

>can this be done” at all? (...) The mere existence of these tools is proof that it can be done.

Then

>DISCLAIMER: I obviously can’t know whether any of these projects were definitely “vibe-coded”, but it also doesn’t matter

..????

We’ve vibecoded internal photoshop capabilities for enterprise graphics design teams for the last 6 months

Opus et all are able to do everything needed client side

Honestly, if this topples Adobe from its unearned throne then fantastic. Adobe’s monopoly is a disgrace to design software and their apps should’ve gotten a lot more attention throughout the years than they have enjoyed historically—especially in the age of AI, where everything they do seems to be focused entirely on their useless Firefly being shoved into every corner of every app, bloating the hell out of already bloated as fuck software.

I’m forced to use Adobe’s apps because they are the golden standard at the moment but I wish with all my heart this to not be the case anymore.

Adobe fucking sucks.

Side-note to whomever attempts to build a new Photoshop: workshop better names. The ones on the article are woefully bad to the point of hilarity.

I'm just going to leave this right here: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

"An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust".

They also have: VectorCraft Vector illustration; FilmCraft Video editing, color and sound; LightCraft Photo library and raw development; PrintCraft Reading, organizing and protecting PDF; EffectCraft Motion graphics and visual effects; DesignCraft Page layout and publishing