Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

swiftcoder

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.

darkwi11ow

See http//localhost:3000

PunchTornado

that's why I am doubling down on software stock.

fugaziboutit

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.

roenxi

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-com... does nice charts

jbellis

https://archive.is/kO6Ph

techpression

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

Next twelve months will be interesting in software quality.

rq1

Photoshop?! Where we’re going, we don’t need photoshop.

jaspanglia

Feels like AI skipped directly to coding and forgot the creative people who’ve been suffering with Photoshop layers for years

charcircuit

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

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.

kingleopold

can all of you say that competitor to photoshop made by AI native teams is impossible in 10 years?

cuechan

I think they have a point. But the "QED" at the end leaves a cringe aftertaste

NotGMan

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

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

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

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.

dude250711

If the crap worked, they would not acquihire coder teams.

wiether

> 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.