Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones

poulpy123

While I'm dubious of these clones, you cannot compare the price for renting the software and the price for building it

minimaxir

OP isn't just making a straw man argument, they're making the entire straw family. > Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job. I legitimately cannot parse the logic behind this argument.

voidUpdate

> "The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera" I knocked up some quick code for drawing on an image a while back as part of a work project, but I've never actually checked how well it works on gigantic images. It calculates the bounding box of your stroke every frame, and uses an SDF-based system to calculate the pixels of the stroke (so if you draw quickly, it will correctly join up the points). I didn't focus too heavily on performance, other than making sure it was good enough to not slow down the app, but since its speed only depends on how much you're actually drawing per frame, rather than the size of the canvas, I'd imagine it would hold up reasonably on gigantic images?

egeozcan

Some valid points but I'm not sure if I agree with the brush engine point. I don't think it's the most important feature of Photoshop to many, so not making that one right first is not that surprising. Making a good brush engine is indeed a very hard problem, especially when you have undo history, high res canvases, layers, zoom etc. I just don't see it of such importance

xvxvx

I hear that groups are using AI to reverse-engineer video games, targeting PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo, with some success, and they’re now able to run natively on Linux and Windows. Add that to the fact all 3 companies have seen massive declines in sales, and hardware costs increasing quite dramatically, this may be the end of the line for the console wars. Interestingly, Sony released some of their exclusives on PC a few years ago and they sold extremely well. So what did Sony do? Announce that no more exclusives will port to PC. Nice work, guys! No one hates Adobe more than their paying customers. I hope everyone involved in the move to subscriptions, including the gross cancellation fees, know that they killed the company.

brianhama

To answer the question regarding bloat in adobe software just look at the creative cloud app and how you have to use it to update and install individual applications. Look at the Adobe Genuine Software service that runs on Windows. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

msy

The tone is angry but understandably so. The labour, creativity and innovation of millions is being stolen and then belittled by grifters shilling slop. Art, design, math, music, software, there's nothing they won't claim they can now copyright-launder and somehow magically render obsolete. But look at any of it and it's never more than the simulacrum of real work. It always looks like the real thing, particularly to the untrained eye but it's always a tissue-paper of stolen work and half-assed, half-working, sloppy output. The prompters are lazy and so are the models. These are powerful, interesting tools but the money, the hype and the grift is just intollerable, a pox on it all. If you're a professional you cannot ignore or avoid it, but you can push towards a future where the commodification of it - open models, open weights, open hardware - turns it into a low-margin overlay on real intellectual work and the hype/grift machine can move on to whatever intellectually bankrupt boondoggle they find next.

mig1

Adobe has been grifting us for ages, so…

tlonny

The “Vibe coders are paedophiles” bit caught me slightly off guard. Felt like that undermined some of the more cogent points the article was making.

tomaskafka

If I was Adobe's marketing department, I wouldn't be sure whether to run around quietly seeding such stories, or be completely silent and hope people won't notice the moat is getting thinner.

gb2d_hn

LGTM (think this video captures the vibe well https://youtu.be/3TNpOD6bov8?is=X9kLvF9WyWHb-slu )

altmanaltman

> And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do). > Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger. I mean okay vibe coded photoshop clones is one thing but arguing your enemies are pedos and you're good guys that deserve all the gratitude in the world is not a great way to make an argument. There are many good valid points in the whole insanity of the whole trend imo but this article drifts a LOT.

close2

Purely reasoned rant of vibe coded clones. Here are 2 quotes, which give you a pretty good idea about the whole article: > They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics. and > Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows.

sznio

i can imagine reading something similar about Linux 30 years ago. > oh nooooo, what's going to happen to all the Unix vendors with the systems they sell for thousands of dollars? adobe has fucked their customers for over a decade, is time they're fucked back. I won't miss them. Hope their employees can find jobs at better companies quickly. also: >They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics. very smart economics, because they do it once and get to have it forever, for free, for everyone. it's charity.

c0rruptbytes

autoresearch can solve a lot of these issues and i am sure people are usually heavily heavily subsidized subscriptions article seems very salty and im not sure why also the economics is you open source something and its saves every one money and opens up more cross compile support, i bet this will scare companies to support linux more properly before linux users just start getting very good at cloning

search_facility

To understand hate against Adobe one have to experience attempt to stop Adobe subscription from renewing. This is truly life-changing experience.

baq

It’s grief. In a couple weeks this ‘pirated’ software (not sure what’s pirated about it btw) will have good brush performance and will be handling 100 megapixel images easily precisely because of this post. I for one am not grieving the saas rent seeking model, but as most folks here (I assume) my livelihood depends on it since that’s how my employer finances my salary. So yes, I’m concerned, but also am aware that technology cannibalizing technology is a thing and we have to move on and make ourselves useful in this new world.

TeriyakiBomb

I mean this crap will die hopefully die off when they get priced out of the needed tokens and their customers realise that there’s a limit to how many times you can write “Claude fix this bug plz” before the “devs” actually need to wade into some real, and at the scale of a vibed up PS clone, extremely confusing engineering. LLMs remain a microwave.

ChickeNES

Reminder, 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177228 - (Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?)

fooker

People are really missing the point here. It's not that you can build a photoshop clone by spending 2000$ in claude API credits. Adobe is going to do a better job than you. What works out easier is that you can build and maintain a version that only has the features you need, with a ~20$ subscription of any of the good AI coding harnesses. I have done this for my photography workflow and discontinued my Adobe subscription.