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.
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.
> neither will the one off random app that only your household uses
This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic. There aren't many useful, high quality APIs out there without a companion app these days.
I encourage you to ask members of your household what apps they use which don't connect with any other apps, sites, or companies. I think we'll find the number is pretty low.
In your mind, what are some apps which don't currently exist which would be solving a bespoke household issue that non-techies will be reaching for vibe coding to solve?
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not convinced the puddle is very deep. It's really hard to compare taking a photo with vibe-coding an app.
The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.
Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.
>printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.
I'm curious if AI will make that part more accessible. You can ask Gemini to make you a parametric openSCAD model and it can do a pretty good job for most designs I've tried. Then just plug in your measurements, export the stl to your slicer, and print.
3D cad is avoided by having a critical mass of other people putting their cad online. I used https://makerworld.com/models/77668 to replace my one that broke. Easy-peasy.
The people empowered by AI don't have to be nontechies, just everyone who has the will for an app to exist but didn't have the means (like interest) to yak-shave into a software engineer just to build one.
It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.
Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.
I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.
Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.
As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.
The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.
Practically speaking it’s rarely cost efficient to vibe code your own all compared to buying. It might cost $100-200 in tokens alone and then there’s the time cost, maintenance, etc. Paying $10/month is cheaper.
I’ll only make an app if there’s nothing else comparable out there (surprisingly common)z
> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.
I think there's a use case for LLM's being able to treat websites as API's (I mean, it is an API, really, running on port 80/443) but this is why attestation seems designed to ensure only large companies can do this and not end users.
It's really funny to be declaring the idea of 3d printers being ubiquitous as dead because they weren't a smartphone scale change in how the world works, while pretending that 3d printers aren't more common and accessible than ever.
Yeah, a better comparison than the smartphone would be something like a table saw. You don't assume everyone has one, but it's not very unusual to have one in the garage.
> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.
You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.
No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.
How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.
> They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure
You and I totally would, but we're nerds!
Think of how much coaxing it takes to get the average North American homeowner to replace a leaky shower head or a spark plug. A lot of normal happy folks will spend their lives not really learning to fix things much, and that's quite alright, IMO. We don't all need to be good at everything.
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.
Grandma likely isn't able to use most existing web apps beyond facebook, her default email client and little else either.
Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.
The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.
> 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.
> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.
The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.
> reducing the cost
The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.
> The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.
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.
> 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time
Six months of fiddling and $X00 in subscription/token fees to make a DIY inventory management app that's going to need regular attention and revision, with ongoing service fees, to accommodate not-quite-right implementations and hidden technical debt.
That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.
The industry needs to deliver on a lot more than that to justify the investments that have been made.
I have developed multiple such applications myself. Essentially a wrapper around SQLite in pick your favourite language, that you then use to extract and combine different data.
I know right and after 6 months it is an app managing a database with some ocr functionality. 6 months for that? I get the wine guy couldn’t do this beforehand, but in the “old days” of say 6 years ago this is the sort of thing you might build after a 60 minute tutorial…
Yes, sure, a fancy CRUD app. Still, enabling a non-programmer to do this is... interesting, and ultimately may be game changing.
He didn't spend a fortune. This wasn't "agentic", eating zillions of tokens. It was the standard stuff anyone could do with a personal subscription ($20/month or so) to a couple of AI services.
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.
I was just talking to a friend of mine who has been making webapps for himself in a similar fashion. Very little to no programming experience. His first app scans his course notes (med school) and creates structured question banks. He's released it so everyone at his school can sign up with their institutional email. The front end is hosted with vercel and the backend with supabase.
He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.
Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.
I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.
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.
> After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today
An increasingly smaller minority of us. The vast majority have gone through a bootcamp, or an undergrad or similar to gain specific skills that they can apply writing software for a corporation.
There's hardly any reason to believe the percentage of the general public that reach that level will be any higher than in the profession itself.
You'd be shocked at how easy Supabase makes these things. You can describe your data needs and it'll use AI to generate the table and RLS policies. You can even go a step further and have Replit do both front and backend. I had chats with multiple PMs who have entire functioning products without understanding a lick of code. Powerful, and although scary from a security perspective, not so scary if it's a personal app.
Supabase scans customer setups and throws up loud warnings for insecure setups aka RLS is disabled on $table, and unless the PM is totally irresponsible, they can throw that email at their LLM of choice and ask it "is this a problem, will I get hacked?" and the LLM will do a fairly competent review of the issue. So it's scary from a security perspective in so far as you do or don't trust AI to find issues.
I was writing a comment about the durability of this app, but you beat me to it. Something tells me that the burden of maintaining this thing through various OS updates, security policy changes (from Apple and Google), new devices, etc. is going to be frustrating for him. It's great that he vibecoded something useful to him in this moment, but I do think these stories are "counting their chickens before they hatch" so to speak.
So the future is - Everyone has their own apps built specifically for their own use case and spending tokens just for the satisfaction to have created something themselves? That sounds like a tool for hobbyists.
I have no clue about wine connoisseur apps but I have to assume that someone some where has build apps to manage the obvious data and now integrating AI into it so that it can do photo to text and reports and summaries etc.
If there are no other apps then commercializing the app might be a better win and use case.
If there are others apps then I can't imagine the nightmare where everyone has their own Supabase/Firebase/AWS etc instances and run their private apps because it does things exactly as what they want to do along with satisfaction of spending 6 months on it. Instead of paying for an app which might be used across the industry and helped them save those 6 months.
Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.
I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.
A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.
A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.
Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.
And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.
These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.
I think you are too cynical. His app works. It needs no maintenance, unless the underlying OS changes something fundamental. It doesn't use AWS or any other cloud service.
Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.
AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.
The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling.
It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, the data grows 10x and emailing spreadsheets back and forth becomes too error prone, or any other of the well-known ways that this falls apart.
Those of us in software always cringe and want to use a database.
“Vibe-coded apps are the new spreadsheet.” Seems about right, and the problems will be similar.
Edit: This comes across as more negative than I wanted. I think spreadsheet-driven businesses are pretty amazing, and it's a testament to the tool how far they can get. I pretty much feel that way about bespoke vibe-coded apps. I'd feel even better about it if the rhetoric wasn't mixed in with claiming software as a career is over or that no one will have jobs anymore.
I want that to be true because it means I'll still have a job, but vibe coded apps by non-developers are still backed by git (as far as I've seen), addressing at least one issue with spreadsheets, and are hosted on Vercel, and backed by Supabase, so there's no sending files back and forth and the database (PostgreSQL) has backups and is able to scale somewhat. What are the other well-known ways that spreadsheets fall apart? If the person leaves, all the next person has to do when something breaks is to the LLM the problem and ask it to fix it. You couldn't do that with a spreadsheet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The number of non-technical people I've seen making simple tools/scripts to automate bits of their workflow is astonishing.
The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is. Of the remaining who do, I would not be shocked that they’re capable of asking an LLM to produce one for them.
>> The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is.
They don't need to know what it is. "Hey ChatGPT I have to check this report daily and update a spreadsheet with the latest changes, can you do it for me?"
Can you come up with a better example? I ask ChatGPT your question verbatim:
> Hey ChatGPT I have to check this report daily and update a spreadsheet with the latest changes, can you do it for me?
And it recommends:
- process automation using a script (I don’t know what that is)
- parse the report (what’s parsing?)
- update the spreadsheet automatically (cool, how?)
- highlight differences (no I want it done automatically)
Obviously I want it done automatically, so I tell it it’s excel and its next response tells me to use “pip install pandas”. I close the browser and go back to work.
So yeah, trivial for you and me, but you can’t act like we’re in magic wizard territory.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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/, 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-p...
That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
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".
Yup. You still have to do some manual work if you want to create something like a comic and make sure each panel is internally consistent with the world. Heck, even OpenAI’s own cookbook demonstration of the dog comic was a complete mess. I ended up having to make a lot of manual edits just to fix it.
I also think most people fall into the Fiverr camp: they need something that’s “good enough,” and don't have a particularly critical eye for detail - in which case even one-shotting with the latest models, gpt-image-2 or nb2 can get you there.
ChatGPT's image pipeline used to completely suck at sequential edits - i.e. "compounding piss filter" and more. The new Images 2.0 one is a generational leap over that. Have you tried it? Do you still have issues?
Not sure what top export resolution is in the system now, but they did bump it up some.
What remains is no true native CMYK? But that is a somewhat niche capability. Not sure if you can partially compensate in "pre" by prompting for print-ready images to keep gamuts constrained and get reasonable outcomes from a naive RGB->CMYK conversion.
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
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.
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.
I don't pay subs for things like photoshop. It doesn't matter if I can "afford" it. It could be one cent per year and still I just don't want stuff that's set up that way.
Right, me neither, I avoid subscriptions like a plague.
But clearly you and I aren't the typical person here, considering the success of some SaaS, and considering the amount of money Adobe et al makes regardless of their choices. So hard to say they're "wrong" when the system and ecosystem effectively actively prize them for their choices, with their wallet.
> 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 ?
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!
Would you like to specify exactly what part is nonsense from that quoted part? Because it's what I saw myself first-hand when I owned a restaurant, so would be interesting to here what exactly of that you think is "nonsense"?
> So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.
No, my point is that even if you're basically part-time "starting out"/"fresh", you most likely can afford it, which is different than a professional user who uses it every day.
Back in the day, it truly was "You can only afford Photoshop if you use it professionally every day" but today you can work as a waiter and have photography as a hobby, and still be able to afford it.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's a strangely/poorly written article. I've read it a couple of times and am still not 100% clear what the author is trying to say.
As best I can tell, the author is saying that it's unrealistic to expect that a vibecoded photoshop would YET exist since just because you can use AI to help doesn't make the task much easier or quicker. If this is the right take, then I guess he's really talking about AI-assisted development (i.e. AI coding used as a tool by a human developer), rather than "vibe coding" in the sense of "here's some specs - write this for me". With AI as a coding tool, then all the hard work is still left to the human - coding it up once you've specced and designed it was never the hard part.
With Karpathy-style vibe coding - just tell the AI what you want it to build - it's either going to succeed fast or fail fast, so "where is the vibecoded Photoshop" is then a reasonable question, albeit a rhetorical one, reflecting that this type of "gimme X" vibecoding isn't able to produce something of that nature, so of course if doesn't exist.
Yeah it has a confusing clickbait title that gives the wrong impression of what the article is about. His point is that the bottleneck to making a complex app like photoshop is architectural rather than just writing basic code… and he argues the LLMs don’t magically make the architectural part easier.
This is the first time in my life I have ever felt the need of an LLM to understand an article. Even after understanding the overall gist of the article (thanks ChatGPT!), I still can't make head or tail of many sentences and find many questionable choices made in the way the article was structured.
e.g.
>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.
This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.
Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.
AH! That brings the whole thing into context. So to charitably paraphrase the argument, it's something like: "If I used AI to produce something technically impressive, my human input was still an important part of the process. Nobody has vibecoded (AI-generated without human guidance) a photoshop, which is evidence that the human input/oversight is still important. Therefore my AI-assisted work is important/impressive/valuable."
> I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post.
That's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.
At least you know it wasn’t written by AI… maybe it was left in a draft state because the author disliked the idea of being accused of writing it with AI
That makes it better? That's what bugs me about the anti-AI sentiment. I'm supposed to want to read worse, more poorly written work (like said article) because it has a human touch to it? Yes it would be great if everyone had perfect writing skills, but we're all human, so we don't. If someone uses an LLM to help them get their point across so it's easier to understand where they're coming from, why penalize them for it?
I think the point is that people who are making the accusation of vibecoding (or just using a prompt to make something) don't understand the work that it takes to make something.
Something similar happened with the invention of the synthesizer. (Specifically, the giant, modular Moog and its contemporaries like the Arp.) People made accusations about the synthesizer doing all the work and playing all the music; when in reality it was often harder (at the time) to play the synthesizer than traditional keyboarded instruments.
You can learn about this if you read about some of the accusations against Keith Emerson.
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.
> Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made
The rough argument being made is that a bunch of folks go around lobbing vibe coding accusations at LLM users, because those folks are afraid that LLMs are taking their coding jobs. And that this anger is misdirected, since coding wasn't actually the moat in software development, and LLMs aren't making much of a dent in software architecture or product design.
But the vast majority of people don't hate vibe coding because it is a cheat code to enhance their productivity. They hate it because it isn't a cheat code and it isn't a cheat code because the results are off from what they ideally should be. So now they are forced to make less decisions, care less about the results and outcomes, for the sake of pretending to be more productive when a simpler LLM chat + copy paste + edit flow could have been closer to the desired end result than letting an agent loose without even looking at the code.
A lot of AI writing is bad and you notice it immediately. AI changes the cost calculus towards unnecessary verbosity and exploring paths that lead to nowhere. Writing block is usually because you don't have anything to say. If you had anything to say, the words would just flood out of your fingers. Easily two thousand to four thousand words per day. You wouldn't be able to keep up physically with your own brain.
I don't know or care whether the blog post is written with AI, but it's not a very good article, because it fails to explain what "the accusation" is, who "the accusers" are and who is being "accused". Despite it being the core part of the article and it being in opposition to the title the article endlessly drifts in its own vagueness, where nothing is concrete and everything is unsaid. It's a puzzle where you're supposed to put the pieces together, you're supposed to just get it and know what the author is thinking, without the author ever having to bother explicitly telling you, so that no matter what interpretation you choose, the author can always gotcha you that you didn't get it, when "it" was never conveyed.
The Photoshop and the gate/level paragraphs are easily read as a criticism of vibe coding, but the accusation paragraphs are a defense of vibe coding.
Honestly, this is giving me "heads I win, tails you lose" vibes.
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.
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".
> 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.
Why do you believe that? What if I care so much about black and white and need a specific algorithm, isn't it much better to do that through a tool I can control rather than any proprietary one?
... because there are open source tools that implement these things properly? Take Darktable, if you try to build an alternative because you "just want to do a bit of color grading" you will produce garbage.
My point is that AI bros are forgetting that the LLM is only as good as the person using it. If you don't sufficiently understand the problem you're solving, your solution will be terrible. If you believe that AI will simply take that work away from you and do it itself, you should ask your favorite LLM to explain how LLMs work.
> ... because there are open source tools that implement these things properly? Take Darktable, if you try to build an alternative because you "just want to do a bit of color grading" you will produce garbage.
... only if you don't pay attention. The existence and popularity of Darktable literally means that LLMs have a reference implementation on-hand and probably seen some of it in training too. If for some reason they don't immediately go looking at it, then you can always ask.
> If you don't sufficiently understand the problem you're solving, your solution will be terrible.
Fortunately the LLM is able to help you with first understanding the problem space, too. Just don't expect it today to zero-shot things you don't understand well enough.
LLMs are approaching the affordances that OpenSource claimed to offer but never did.
Non-coders are discovering the basics of - for example - Python scripting and running with it.
If this gets easy enough - questionable so far, but maybe one day - all code will be "Do this thing to this photo/document/music project."
The big toolbox products will become redundant.
Everyone is distacted by content generation, but if LLMs get good enough it will be possible to go back a step and give everyone a toolbox factory they can use to imagine and build whatever they want, with full control, instead of the current stab-around-until-you-find-something generative approach.
I suspect that if you start seeing vibecoded "PhotoShop alternatives" productised, they won't look like PhotoShop at all: They'll be something like a bunch of image manipulation tools with an agent loop and scripting, to make it easier to create and run a bunch of 0.1%-Photoshops on-the-fly and save/reuse them.
So something more like Claude's artefacts support, just hiding the techie bits for users not comfortable with that, with specialised tooling.
I'm guessing we'll see a bunch of apps like that eating into various traditional big monolithic tools.
It's almost like people are finding out what scripting is because ai can do it for them.
This isn't new most businesses are run on scripts that process data. The only difference now is that more people can write them instead of paying for an app.
So the narrative here is wrong. Because vibe coding an app is overkill, in the same way that paying through the nose for a giant app that you only use one basic feature set of is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. People buy and use fully fledged applications like Photoshop or get Affinity.
2. People ask AI to do their image editing / creation tasks.
The number of people who will have AI make programs for image editing is so small as to not even count. And they will only do it for tinkering reasons to make a vector image of Tux the penguin and then never use it again.
So in your mind, there is no scenario where people ask AI to create a more focused (even single-purpose) image editing app, and either make it free or charge a small amount?
Because I'm seeing that happening more and more. Just as one random example, I've lost count of the number of vibe coded captioning apps I've seen for FCP, because it's a known pain point in the software.
Sure, but there isn't much of a business in it I would say. People who are too cheap to pay for Photoshop aren't going to pay for a small tool either. And Affinity is already free and very powerful.
...and ultra high velocity single human person agent swarm vibe coded replacements for existing software and SaaS should come out en masse. Where are they?
You seem to be arguing that vibecoding photoshop wasn't possible up until 2 months ago, with GPT 5.4/5.5.
That's a very, very weird take on many, many levels. Could you elaborate a bit about where that view came from, how often you use AI, what's your career etc.?
Before Codex with GPT 5.4 and 5.5 I was working on a single feature only, no parallel conversations, and a ton of permission prompts would make it impossible for the agent to even work for five minutes on its own.
> People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI.
Not really, the "people on here" rather consider that Anthropic and co. are profiting from you by making you think it's better to give them money to develop your app rather than do it yourself or hire a developer. The hype is there to steer you towards AI.
20 hours a week must be quite expensive in tokens.
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.
I recently had a coworker open my eyes to why vibe coding, or AI-assisted coding is so popular. He likened it to a slot machine, where pulling the slot's arm is like asking an LLM to code something. You get crap most of the time, but when it works, it's like getting a payout. That dopamine hit keeps them pulling, hoping for another hit, and they then believe it's a better way to develop software.
Oh that’s definitely it. Even Steve Yegge mad with vibecoded powers has said it feels a lot like gambling. I wouldn’t trust the judgment of gamblers talking about their ‘winnings’, so to speak.
Hey, rate limits are incredibly frustrating, but contributing to HN is worth it. Try writing a polite, brief email to hn@ycombinator.com with a link to your user profile. Tell them that you’ve re-read the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and that you’re willing to follow them. Then ask if it would be possible for the rate limit to be removed.
My gut reaction looking over your account is that you mean well but get a little heated. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147587 responds to no one in particular and calls HN drivel. Don’t do that. Thoughts like that are normal, but expressing them is difficult to do in a substantive way. It’s often better to not say anything if you feel yourself getting upset. (There are plenty of exceptions to this, but you have to do it in a way where you’re writing for the audience here, not for yourself.)
I think if you really put your mind to it, you can write substantively and stay off the rate limit list. Good luck.
But I don't think I'm going to email the mods and beg them to remove me from some list they added me to without notifying me.
I don’t feel like apologizing for complaining about the drivel some write because they don't like LLMs.
It was not my most substantial or productive comment, but I feel it is fair enough and did not target anyone in particular.
Contributing to HN is not worth it.
I'm spending my time, compromising my privacy, and advising potential competitors on what works best in my workflow. It's often not appreciated, so I might as well stop commenting so much.
"I am 100x productive with AI, I can ship in days what took months before" and "oh no, you don't understand, it's not really possible to vibecode Photoshop" found elsewhere in this thread.
If I were magically 100x productive, the first thing I would do would be to recreate Photoshop.
There is nothing close to Photoshop (or the Affinity suite) that runs natively on Linux. Despite how niche that market is, one could make big bank if they could magically create a valid alternative out of thin air. I’d pay hundreds of dollars for it myself. I don’t even care about PSD compatibility.
Okay, well there's a huge difference between Photoshop and Affinity, because Affinity includes an Illustrator and InDesign alternative as well.
What specifically do you need to do in Photoshop? Photo editing? Design? Illustration? It sounds like you have a concrete need if you're willing to part with hundreds of dollars. I've developed a number of graphics apps over the years, so my interest is not academic.
Do you use Photoshop? The underlying engine which gives support for layers and smart objects is in itself such an amazing piece of tech that nobody seems to get even close to (and I’ve tried them all).
The brush engine is fantastic, liquify and the general support for plugins, and heck, just the basic math behind the filters.
Canva and Figma are layout tools, not for pixel editing.
Recreating it would make it faster and cheaper, something that has been driving software for decades.
I'm not being argumentative; I was genuinely trying to understand why you would aim to recreate Photoshop in particular, because Photoshop includes such a huge range of functionality. If it's about recreating the brush engine, that's pretty achievable. I would be curious to learn why Krita is not enough though.
Context: I've developed multiple Photoshop file format parsers/writers and know Photoshop at a very deep level. And would never want to replicate the specific set of tradeoffs Adobe made in the 1980s.
That’s fair, it’s just that a lot of the functionality overlaps in very rewarding ways, even if you only use the overlap 5% it’s incredibly frustrating to not have that function when you need it
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/#sec=charts, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=diagrams). Slides coming soon too... But this is very much a subsection of the full Office suite.
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.
> 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.
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
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)
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.
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?
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.
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-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
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).
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.
Nobody who wanted to erase a tree or fix their smile paid for Photoshop anyway. and Photoshop does a a lor more than pixel manipulation. So, a moot point.
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.
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
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.
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
I'm two weeks into a vibecoded Illustrator, actually (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-horizon....
I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Just to be clear, I spent Billions of tokens last month, dick'ing around with AI, do I think it can do my job, sure if I was as checked out as I am feeling being mandated to only use AI for work...
Trust me this version of me can't write code better than an LLM. I think even the LLMs from 2 years ago could do as much.
Only thing we have solved with LLMs is how to generate code, as in literally converting what you type in as text into something somewhat working. Fixing the details is impossible for AI.
Same mistakes Indian IT Service firms already did, trusting third-party AI Service providers across every division and department in companies.
Now Open AI and Anthropic are launching own Service firm/wing for maximizing ROI. Direct Competition. Huge Loss for Indian IT Service Firms.
They paid AI providers to Train own automated competition end to end so much so that they are learnt the gaps and how-to own the market by corrections, private IP Source code access and embedded expertise extraction (stopping short of calling it literal corporate espionage, they got all the know-how and especially for modernizing legacy tech and integrations).
They are untrustworthy especially where IP is involved.
Indian and other IT Firms who did not use private self-hosted AI for important things nor monitored the usage and did not train their employees to think what ( or how much) of our institutional knowledge goes out to third-party are already facing trouble.
I couldn't parse all of it, but largely I honestly think software is a sum of it's details you write better software the more details you add to the picture while maintaining simplicity. The art of software is balancing the two.
You can also find this in science, I feel like software is about finding the Gauss’s law for the dozens of electrostatic principles the masses keep coming up with.
AI strips away the need for simplicity by making brute forcing details via verbosity that ruins the need for "good" software, and makes all software by definition unmaintainable since maintainable product as a unit has to be simple enough for a LLM or a human mind to understand.
Currently a human context window is in 100s of billions of tokens, while LLMs seem to max out at 1M.
For anyone thinking but humans can't produce all of the text verbatim, that's the difference b/w humans and machines we can parse and take the most essential parts from 100B token context it's just are speed of prefil and recall is slower. And we memoize learning so if we know X then all variants of X are learnt on the same foundation.
Human learning is so very different from LLMs is so very fascinating as a trad "AI engineer", well some person who has worked and built/shipped ai agents and models at scale.
I accept AI is a tool for a user who knows the fundamentals, and hope it makes the citizen developers or people who are not trained in programming to get more systems thinking. Its best if it makes more programmers when they want to understand the stuff.
Fun analogy Kinda like power tools like are we tightening a screw using a screwdriver or doing it with a power drill. Case in point there is chance of ease as well as more risk while doing it with power drill.
You are absolutely right, it can be guided to produce code but needs corrections like its too easy to create unmaintainable solutions.
Also to untrained eye without good architecture, it does the job but when one who doesn't have architectural skill will think that's enough and there's no more room for improvement. This cause troubles in their production.
Like if it solves their pain points and makes them think systematically and critically. That is better.
What i don't like is giving much information to 3rd party service providers of AI developer tooling LLMs + Copilot and such, which is causing lot of real market level Risk for Indian IT Service Firms and has started costing jobs and literally erosion of market share because the service providers like Open AI launched their own firms like Deploy.Co.
Smaller companies who didn't know any better using tooling and developing stuff and on growth bringing professionals to fix mistakes has been happening long. There are literally companies who made solutions by Access and Sold it to clients, we literally told them even as competitors to compile the things as programs to avoid from future cases of fraud by their Users who were doing shady things.
I expect a coding model being able to clone apps like Photoshop in the next two years.
But creating an app like that from scratch without a paragon (which is what Adobe did with Photoshop) is a lot harder.
+ can you even define what is Photoshop? What capabilities does Photoshop have? Ignoring all the edge cases that it supports, what Photoshop allows you to do?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
“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.
>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.
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.
They mention Vibecoded compiler, here is one: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with you, but at the same time I went to university to study music production when Napster just came out. That decimated the music industry forever and I dropped out because I realised I'd made a bad move.
I can totally see how ai could do the same thing to all sorts of art industries that have not had their Napster moment yet.
I can argue that the music industry is decimated not directly by Napster, but their practices and dogmas set ground for it.
For me, even as a broke student "Free!" was not the charm, but "accessibility". I made music, played in orchestras. I know the effort required, and never wanted to steal livelihoods from people, but music before Napster was inaccessible.
Some free radios, expensive CDs and cheap cassettes with bad sound quality. It was impossible to explore and listen a broad spectrum of music.
Now I can try and buy albums. Yes, the publishers still earn way more than the musician, but it didn't start with Napster. It was still like that before Napster.
FWIW, I bought and still buy music rather than streaming it, I'd happily continue doing so. I just want DRM-Free high quality music to listen on various devices of mine, that's all.
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.
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.
yes, if I ever lose my job to an emerging technology, I will simply find another occupation instead of demanding the reality to bend to my will and that technology to be banned, outlawed, regulated out of existence. unlike the bohemian types, I do not consider myself to deserve some kind of affirmative action bullshit made just for me.
and so will tens of thousands of others like you. Good luck finding a job in that scenario. We will soon find out why so many millions of people leave their homes to find better opportunities else where. Except this time there'll be nowhere left to go to. All for "level 1".
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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"?
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.
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.
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.
> neither will the one off random app that only your household uses
This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic. There aren't many useful, high quality APIs out there without a companion app these days.
I encourage you to ask members of your household what apps they use which don't connect with any other apps, sites, or companies. I think we'll find the number is pretty low.
In your mind, what are some apps which don't currently exist which would be solving a bespoke household issue that non-techies will be reaching for vibe coding to solve?
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not convinced the puddle is very deep. It's really hard to compare taking a photo with vibe-coding an app.
> would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs
The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.
Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.
Similarly, it seems like people are finding out the hard way that coding is the easy part and software design/architecture is much harder.
It was always the hard part, hence why experienced eng get paid 5-10x what new grad do. It’s not because they type faster.
>printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.
I'm curious if AI will make that part more accessible. You can ask Gemini to make you a parametric openSCAD model and it can do a pretty good job for most designs I've tried. Then just plug in your measurements, export the stl to your slicer, and print.
3D cad is avoided by having a critical mass of other people putting their cad online. I used https://makerworld.com/models/77668 to replace my one that broke. Easy-peasy.
The people empowered by AI don't have to be nontechies, just everyone who has the will for an app to exist but didn't have the means (like interest) to yak-shave into a software engineer just to build one.
It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.
Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.
I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.
Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.
As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.
The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.
Practically speaking it’s rarely cost efficient to vibe code your own all compared to buying. It might cost $100-200 in tokens alone and then there’s the time cost, maintenance, etc. Paying $10/month is cheaper.
I’ll only make an app if there’s nothing else comparable out there (surprisingly common)z
It's "free" if you want it to be.
> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.
I think there's a use case for LLM's being able to treat websites as API's (I mean, it is an API, really, running on port 80/443) but this is why attestation seems designed to ensure only large companies can do this and not end users.
It's really funny to be declaring the idea of 3d printers being ubiquitous as dead because they weren't a smartphone scale change in how the world works, while pretending that 3d printers aren't more common and accessible than ever.
Yeah, a better comparison than the smartphone would be something like a table saw. You don't assume everyone has one, but it's not very unusual to have one in the garage.
> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.
You're quite wrong.
You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.
No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.
How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.
> They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure
You and I totally would, but we're nerds!
Think of how much coaxing it takes to get the average North American homeowner to replace a leaky shower head or a spark plug. A lot of normal happy folks will spend their lives not really learning to fix things much, and that's quite alright, IMO. We don't all need to be good at everything.
I actually printed a few PETG ones. They are nigh indestructable compared to PVC.
As noted above, it's the mechanical design / CAD that has to be seriously learned to do anything useful.
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.
Grandma likely isn't able to use most existing web apps beyond facebook, her default email client and little else either.
Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.
The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.
> 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.
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.
> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.
The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.
> reducing the cost
The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.
> The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.
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.
> 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time
Six months of fiddling and $X00 in subscription/token fees to make a DIY inventory management app that's going to need regular attention and revision, with ongoing service fees, to accommodate not-quite-right implementations and hidden technical debt.
That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.
The industry needs to deliver on a lot more than that to justify the investments that have been made.
No need to be wealthy. Last December I paid $180 for an year of Z.ai's coding plan. It's enough for hobby use.
> That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.
Isn't this exactly how many technologies get started?
A PC used to cost as much as a very nice used car, and had few practical uses cases, as one example.
I have developed multiple such applications myself. Essentially a wrapper around SQLite in pick your favourite language, that you then use to extract and combine different data.
I know right and after 6 months it is an app managing a database with some ocr functionality. 6 months for that? I get the wine guy couldn’t do this beforehand, but in the “old days” of say 6 years ago this is the sort of thing you might build after a 60 minute tutorial…
> It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app.
That still seems like a simple CRUD app.
Steady on, I'd say it's at least a fancy CRUD app.
Yes, sure, a fancy CRUD app. Still, enabling a non-programmer to do this is... interesting, and ultimately may be game changing.
He didn't spend a fortune. This wasn't "agentic", eating zillions of tokens. It was the standard stuff anyone could do with a personal subscription ($20/month or so) to a couple of AI services.
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.
I was just talking to a friend of mine who has been making webapps for himself in a similar fashion. Very little to no programming experience. His first app scans his course notes (med school) and creates structured question banks. He's released it so everyone at his school can sign up with their institutional email. The front end is hosted with vercel and the backend with supabase.
He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.
Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.
I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.
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.
> After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today
An increasingly smaller minority of us. The vast majority have gone through a bootcamp, or an undergrad or similar to gain specific skills that they can apply writing software for a corporation.
There's hardly any reason to believe the percentage of the general public that reach that level will be any higher than in the profession itself.
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
You'd be shocked at how easy Supabase makes these things. You can describe your data needs and it'll use AI to generate the table and RLS policies. You can even go a step further and have Replit do both front and backend. I had chats with multiple PMs who have entire functioning products without understanding a lick of code. Powerful, and although scary from a security perspective, not so scary if it's a personal app.
Supabase scans customer setups and throws up loud warnings for insecure setups aka RLS is disabled on $table, and unless the PM is totally irresponsible, they can throw that email at their LLM of choice and ask it "is this a problem, will I get hacked?" and the LLM will do a fairly competent review of the issue. So it's scary from a security perspective in so far as you do or don't trust AI to find issues.
I was writing a comment about the durability of this app, but you beat me to it. Something tells me that the burden of maintaining this thing through various OS updates, security policy changes (from Apple and Google), new devices, etc. is going to be frustrating for him. It's great that he vibecoded something useful to him in this moment, but I do think these stories are "counting their chickens before they hatch" so to speak.
It's not like you can't write "update this for next round of forced obsolescence " to Claude. Yes, it's unnecessary burden but solvable.
So the future is - Everyone has their own apps built specifically for their own use case and spending tokens just for the satisfaction to have created something themselves? That sounds like a tool for hobbyists.
I have no clue about wine connoisseur apps but I have to assume that someone some where has build apps to manage the obvious data and now integrating AI into it so that it can do photo to text and reports and summaries etc.
If there are no other apps then commercializing the app might be a better win and use case.
If there are others apps then I can't imagine the nightmare where everyone has their own Supabase/Firebase/AWS etc instances and run their private apps because it does things exactly as what they want to do along with satisfaction of spending 6 months on it. Instead of paying for an app which might be used across the industry and helped them save those 6 months.
Yeah, I think I agree with your assessment.
Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.
I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.
A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.
A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.
Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.
And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.
These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.
I think you are too cynical. His app works. It needs no maintenance, unless the underlying OS changes something fundamental. It doesn't use AWS or any other cloud service.
Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.
AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.
Much of this could be done with a spreadsheet.
Not exactly revolutionary in the way you’re claiming.
Half of the current startups could be done with a speadsheet and yet they earn money.
The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling.
It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, the data grows 10x and emailing spreadsheets back and forth becomes too error prone, or any other of the well-known ways that this falls apart.
Those of us in software always cringe and want to use a database.
“Vibe-coded apps are the new spreadsheet.” Seems about right, and the problems will be similar.
Edit: This comes across as more negative than I wanted. I think spreadsheet-driven businesses are pretty amazing, and it's a testament to the tool how far they can get. I pretty much feel that way about bespoke vibe-coded apps. I'd feel even better about it if the rhetoric wasn't mixed in with claiming software as a career is over or that no one will have jobs anymore.
Institutional knowledge is just valued at $0.
I want that to be true because it means I'll still have a job, but vibe coded apps by non-developers are still backed by git (as far as I've seen), addressing at least one issue with spreadsheets, and are hosted on Vercel, and backed by Supabase, so there's no sending files back and forth and the database (PostgreSQL) has backups and is able to scale somewhat. What are the other well-known ways that spreadsheets fall apart? If the person leaves, all the next person has to do when something breaks is to the LLM the problem and ask it to fix it. You couldn't do that with a spreadsheet.
UI/UX is important.
Man, I wish he open sourced in on GitHub, I’d love to customize it for my own collection.
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.
I think your last half remains to be determined.
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.
It's no longer a choice. The AI is already causing changes in how competition, investors and users behave.
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.
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.
> The number of non-technical people I've seen making simple tools/scripts to automate bits of their workflow is astonishing.
The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is. Of the remaining who do, I would not be shocked that they’re capable of asking an LLM to produce one for them.
>> The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is.
They don't need to know what it is. "Hey ChatGPT I have to check this report daily and update a spreadsheet with the latest changes, can you do it for me?"
Can you come up with a better example? I ask ChatGPT your question verbatim:
> Hey ChatGPT I have to check this report daily and update a spreadsheet with the latest changes, can you do it for me?
And it recommends:
Obviously I want it done automatically, so I tell it it’s excel and its next response tells me to use “pip install pandas”. I close the browser and go back to work.So yeah, trivial for you and me, but you can’t act like we’re in magic wizard territory.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I think there's some low-hanging money to be made with a nearly-feature-complete PS clone.
Your competition, gimp, is free already.
Not to mention Photopea [0]
The Affinity suite is also free now
https://www.affinity.studio/
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.
Why do you need the AI to write a script? Why not have the AI do the work without a "script"?
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?
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.
A script will last forever, and doesn’t cost tokens to run.
> 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/, 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-p...
That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
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".
Yup. You still have to do some manual work if you want to create something like a comic and make sure each panel is internally consistent with the world. Heck, even OpenAI’s own cookbook demonstration of the dog comic was a complete mess. I ended up having to make a lot of manual edits just to fix it.
I also think most people fall into the Fiverr camp: they need something that’s “good enough,” and don't have a particularly critical eye for detail - in which case even one-shotting with the latest models, gpt-image-2 or nb2 can get you there.
Same experience on my end. It's crazy what the latest version can pull off, with reference images, text, etc.
so both of you do not understand what Photoshop is really used for.
Do you? I somehow doubt it.
Can you provide an example of something "Photoshop is really used for" that ChatGPT Images 2.0 is completely incapable of doing?
- Keeping a human face exactly the same while removing imperfections and being able to make small, purely non-destructive edits in series.
- Export in very high quality without estimative upscaling.
Are you up to date on frontier capabilities?
ChatGPT's image pipeline used to completely suck at sequential edits - i.e. "compounding piss filter" and more. The new Images 2.0 one is a generational leap over that. Have you tried it? Do you still have issues?
Not sure what top export resolution is in the system now, but they did bump it up some.
What remains is no true native CMYK? But that is a somewhat niche capability. Not sure if you can partially compensate in "pre" by prompting for print-ready images to keep gamuts constrained and get reasonable outcomes from a naive RGB->CMYK conversion.
I used to hire people to do photoshop for me. So yes, I kind of get the idea.
I don't hire them anymore. Can you guess why?
So tell us instead of being vague And condescending?
Those were never the users of photoshp. I guess canva will get a big hit due to this.
> 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.
Photoshop is a wrong tool for diagrams.
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
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.
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.
I don't pay subs for things like photoshop. It doesn't matter if I can "afford" it. It could be one cent per year and still I just don't want stuff that's set up that way.
Right, me neither, I avoid subscriptions like a plague.
But clearly you and I aren't the typical person here, considering the success of some SaaS, and considering the amount of money Adobe et al makes regardless of their choices. So hard to say they're "wrong" when the system and ecosystem effectively actively prize them for their choices, with their wallet.
> 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 ?
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!
For photos I just used RawTherapee, it's dedicated tool for photo processing and if you are just correcting, not editing it's probably better one too
> Sorry what? This is nonsense.
Would you like to specify exactly what part is nonsense from that quoted part? Because it's what I saw myself first-hand when I owned a restaurant, so would be interesting to here what exactly of that you think is "nonsense"?
> So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.
No, my point is that even if you're basically part-time "starting out"/"fresh", you most likely can afford it, which is different than a professional user who uses it every day.
Back in the day, it truly was "You can only afford Photoshop if you use it professionally every day" but today you can work as a waiter and have photography as a hobby, and still be able to afford it.
So it is the AI image workbench tools like ComfyUI.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I never heard of it, let alone "a lot". Care to give examples?
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.
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.
What is "VLM"?
Vision Language Models
Very large models that aren’t large language models.
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.
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.
You're making really good points.
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
It's a strangely/poorly written article. I've read it a couple of times and am still not 100% clear what the author is trying to say.
As best I can tell, the author is saying that it's unrealistic to expect that a vibecoded photoshop would YET exist since just because you can use AI to help doesn't make the task much easier or quicker. If this is the right take, then I guess he's really talking about AI-assisted development (i.e. AI coding used as a tool by a human developer), rather than "vibe coding" in the sense of "here's some specs - write this for me". With AI as a coding tool, then all the hard work is still left to the human - coding it up once you've specced and designed it was never the hard part.
With Karpathy-style vibe coding - just tell the AI what you want it to build - it's either going to succeed fast or fail fast, so "where is the vibecoded Photoshop" is then a reasonable question, albeit a rhetorical one, reflecting that this type of "gimme X" vibecoding isn't able to produce something of that nature, so of course if doesn't exist.
Yeah it has a confusing clickbait title that gives the wrong impression of what the article is about. His point is that the bottleneck to making a complex app like photoshop is architectural rather than just writing basic code… and he argues the LLMs don’t magically make the architectural part easier.
This is the first time in my life I have ever felt the need of an LLM to understand an article. Even after understanding the overall gist of the article (thanks ChatGPT!), I still can't make head or tail of many sentences and find many questionable choices made in the way the article was structured.
e.g.
>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.
This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.
Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.
For others who are confused.
The author is someone in the demoscene who has been accused of "vibe coding" large pieces of work.
His counter is that if such things are possible, where is the vibe coded Photoshop?
He then goes on a tangent that "vibe coding" is a kind of easy accusation mostly levelled at "neurodiverse" developers
Which is why he ends the post:
AH! That brings the whole thing into context. So to charitably paraphrase the argument, it's something like: "If I used AI to produce something technically impressive, my human input was still an important part of the process. Nobody has vibecoded (AI-generated without human guidance) a photoshop, which is evidence that the human input/oversight is still important. Therefore my AI-assisted work is important/impressive/valuable."
Yes, I think so. Although it's a poor argument in my view: just because nobody has vibe coded Product X, doesn't mean his Product Y was praiseworthy
the lady doth protest too much, Methinks
> I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post.
That's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.
It doesn't help that the article is actually quite poorly written.
At least you know it wasn’t written by AI… maybe it was left in a draft state because the author disliked the idea of being accused of writing it with AI
That makes it better? That's what bugs me about the anti-AI sentiment. I'm supposed to want to read worse, more poorly written work (like said article) because it has a human touch to it? Yes it would be great if everyone had perfect writing skills, but we're all human, so we don't. If someone uses an LLM to help them get their point across so it's easier to understand where they're coming from, why penalize them for it?
I think the point is that people who are making the accusation of vibecoding (or just using a prompt to make something) don't understand the work that it takes to make something.
Something similar happened with the invention of the synthesizer. (Specifically, the giant, modular Moog and its contemporaries like the Arp.) People made accusations about the synthesizer doing all the work and playing all the music; when in reality it was often harder (at the time) to play the synthesizer than traditional keyboarded instruments.
You can learn about this if you read about some of the accusations against Keith Emerson.
Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made
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.
That probably explains why I needed an LLM to make sense of it at all.
Honestly, would’ve been much better to just let the LLM write the whole thing.
> Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made
The rough argument being made is that a bunch of folks go around lobbing vibe coding accusations at LLM users, because those folks are afraid that LLMs are taking their coding jobs. And that this anger is misdirected, since coding wasn't actually the moat in software development, and LLMs aren't making much of a dent in software architecture or product design.
People are making vibe accusations.
Is the author saying that people are accusing "handmade" apps of being vibecoded?
I read the post, but I find it incoherent.
But the vast majority of people don't hate vibe coding because it is a cheat code to enhance their productivity. They hate it because it isn't a cheat code and it isn't a cheat code because the results are off from what they ideally should be. So now they are forced to make less decisions, care less about the results and outcomes, for the sake of pretending to be more productive when a simpler LLM chat + copy paste + edit flow could have been closer to the desired end result than letting an agent loose without even looking at the code.
A lot of AI writing is bad and you notice it immediately. AI changes the cost calculus towards unnecessary verbosity and exploring paths that lead to nowhere. Writing block is usually because you don't have anything to say. If you had anything to say, the words would just flood out of your fingers. Easily two thousand to four thousand words per day. You wouldn't be able to keep up physically with your own brain.
I don't know or care whether the blog post is written with AI, but it's not a very good article, because it fails to explain what "the accusation" is, who "the accusers" are and who is being "accused". Despite it being the core part of the article and it being in opposition to the title the article endlessly drifts in its own vagueness, where nothing is concrete and everything is unsaid. It's a puzzle where you're supposed to put the pieces together, you're supposed to just get it and know what the author is thinking, without the author ever having to bother explicitly telling you, so that no matter what interpretation you choose, the author can always gotcha you that you didn't get it, when "it" was never conveyed.
The Photoshop and the gate/level paragraphs are easily read as a criticism of vibe coding, but the accusation paragraphs are a defense of vibe coding.
Honestly, this is giving me "heads I win, tails you lose" vibes.
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.
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".
> 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.
Why do you believe that? What if I care so much about black and white and need a specific algorithm, isn't it much better to do that through a tool I can control rather than any proprietary one?
... because there are open source tools that implement these things properly? Take Darktable, if you try to build an alternative because you "just want to do a bit of color grading" you will produce garbage.
My point is that AI bros are forgetting that the LLM is only as good as the person using it. If you don't sufficiently understand the problem you're solving, your solution will be terrible. If you believe that AI will simply take that work away from you and do it itself, you should ask your favorite LLM to explain how LLMs work.
> ... because there are open source tools that implement these things properly? Take Darktable, if you try to build an alternative because you "just want to do a bit of color grading" you will produce garbage.
... only if you don't pay attention. The existence and popularity of Darktable literally means that LLMs have a reference implementation on-hand and probably seen some of it in training too. If for some reason they don't immediately go looking at it, then you can always ask.
> If you don't sufficiently understand the problem you're solving, your solution will be terrible.
Fortunately the LLM is able to help you with first understanding the problem space, too. Just don't expect it today to zero-shot things you don't understand well enough.
Yeah but what happens when you do know the names of the algorithms…
Like an experienced digital artist would.
You're saying that, if I go and vibe-code an app to implement a couple of those algorithms, they will be correctly implemented?
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.
Yes, this is the point.
LLMs are approaching the affordances that OpenSource claimed to offer but never did.
Non-coders are discovering the basics of - for example - Python scripting and running with it.
If this gets easy enough - questionable so far, but maybe one day - all code will be "Do this thing to this photo/document/music project."
The big toolbox products will become redundant.
Everyone is distacted by content generation, but if LLMs get good enough it will be possible to go back a step and give everyone a toolbox factory they can use to imagine and build whatever they want, with full control, instead of the current stab-around-until-you-find-something generative approach.
Exactly what will eat into PhotoShop etc.
I suspect that if you start seeing vibecoded "PhotoShop alternatives" productised, they won't look like PhotoShop at all: They'll be something like a bunch of image manipulation tools with an agent loop and scripting, to make it easier to create and run a bunch of 0.1%-Photoshops on-the-fly and save/reuse them.
So something more like Claude's artefacts support, just hiding the techie bits for users not comfortable with that, with specialised tooling.
I'm guessing we'll see a bunch of apps like that eating into various traditional big monolithic tools.
It's almost like people are finding out what scripting is because ai can do it for them.
This isn't new most businesses are run on scripts that process data. The only difference now is that more people can write them instead of paying for an app.
So the narrative here is wrong. Because vibe coding an app is overkill, in the same way that paying through the nose for a giant app that you only use one basic feature set of is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lowering the cost at subsidized pricing. For how long?
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?).
"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.
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.
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/
Photopea is such an amazing project. Pre-AI solo dev, too.
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.
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.
The use case for less capable software is that it is cheaper. Why buy a mansion when all you need is a bedroom?
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.
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.
$0 is a little low.
maybe $3?
For the moment, there is a free tier on every major AI provider, which is more than enough to vibe code a single graphics workflow.
I think there's only two real world scenarios:
1. People buy and use fully fledged applications like Photoshop or get Affinity.
2. People ask AI to do their image editing / creation tasks.
The number of people who will have AI make programs for image editing is so small as to not even count. And they will only do it for tinkering reasons to make a vector image of Tux the penguin and then never use it again.
So in your mind, there is no scenario where people ask AI to create a more focused (even single-purpose) image editing app, and either make it free or charge a small amount?
Because I'm seeing that happening more and more. Just as one random example, I've lost count of the number of vibe coded captioning apps I've seen for FCP, because it's a known pain point in the software.
Sure, but there isn't much of a business in it I would say. People who are too cheap to pay for Photoshop aren't going to pay for a small tool either. And Affinity is already free and very powerful.
Just saying… Canva started as a "small tool" that was in no way competitive with Photoshop.
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.
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.
...and ultra high velocity single human person agent swarm vibe coded replacements for existing software and SaaS should come out en masse. Where are they?
I understand Codex had 500k weekly users at the beginning of the year, now they have 4M.
GPT 5.4 came out at the start of March, GPT 5.5 end of April.
What do you expect, that we all go to market with a Photoshop competitor within two months?
Edit: and I can't provide any more replies since once again some automatic system or a mod rate limited my account for whatever reason.
You seem to be arguing that vibecoding photoshop wasn't possible up until 2 months ago, with GPT 5.4/5.5.
That's a very, very weird take on many, many levels. Could you elaborate a bit about where that view came from, how often you use AI, what's your career etc.?
In b4 agents have been shit up until a month ago. There hasn’t been much time yet!!
This is pretty much true.
Before Codex with GPT 5.4 and 5.5 I was working on a single feature only, no parallel conversations, and a ton of permission prompts would make it impossible for the agent to even work for five minutes on its own.
Times have changed.
People like you write a whole lot.
Talk about the numbers.
Cost reduction and revenue generation.
Anything else irrelevant - nobody cares. The world is about making money and moving things forward.
I hope to publish my app in a month or two, after sufficient polish, market research, and App Store optimization.
As I said, it's not exactly realistic to ask for numbers and a Photoshop competitor within two months.
Let's see at the end of the year how that went with the supposedly disappointing actual output and no layoffs.
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.
> People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI.
Not really, the "people on here" rather consider that Anthropic and co. are profiting from you by making you think it's better to give them money to develop your app rather than do it yourself or hire a developer. The hype is there to steer you towards AI.
20 hours a week must be quite expensive in tokens.
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.
Can you share a link to your app?
I recently had a coworker open my eyes to why vibe coding, or AI-assisted coding is so popular. He likened it to a slot machine, where pulling the slot's arm is like asking an LLM to code something. You get crap most of the time, but when it works, it's like getting a payout. That dopamine hit keeps them pulling, hoping for another hit, and they then believe it's a better way to develop software.
Oh that’s definitely it. Even Steve Yegge mad with vibecoded powers has said it feels a lot like gambling. I wouldn’t trust the judgment of gamblers talking about their ‘winnings’, so to speak.
The difference is that you don't just pull again.
You guide the originally mediocre result towards a good outcome by providing feedback and potentially technical insights.
That's not a gamble, it works reliably enough.
Hey, rate limits are incredibly frustrating, but contributing to HN is worth it. Try writing a polite, brief email to hn@ycombinator.com with a link to your user profile. Tell them that you’ve re-read the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and that you’re willing to follow them. Then ask if it would be possible for the rate limit to be removed.
My gut reaction looking over your account is that you mean well but get a little heated. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147587 responds to no one in particular and calls HN drivel. Don’t do that. Thoughts like that are normal, but expressing them is difficult to do in a substantive way. It’s often better to not say anything if you feel yourself getting upset. (There are plenty of exceptions to this, but you have to do it in a way where you’re writing for the audience here, not for yourself.)
I think if you really put your mind to it, you can write substantively and stay off the rate limit list. Good luck.
Thanks, I appreciate the info.
But I don't think I'm going to email the mods and beg them to remove me from some list they added me to without notifying me.
I don’t feel like apologizing for complaining about the drivel some write because they don't like LLMs.
It was not my most substantial or productive comment, but I feel it is fair enough and did not target anyone in particular.
Contributing to HN is not worth it.
I'm spending my time, compromising my privacy, and advising potential competitors on what works best in my workflow. It's often not appreciated, so I might as well stop commenting so much.
Companies are forward looking, they wouldn't wait until the end of the year if LLMs were truly as disruptive as AI believers are saying.
Funny how that works both ways.
"I am 100x productive with AI, I can ship in days what took months before" and "oh no, you don't understand, it's not really possible to vibecode Photoshop" found elsewhere in this thread.
If I were magically 100x productive, the first thing I would do would be to recreate Photoshop.
Can I ask why? Specifically, why Photoshop and not Canva, or Figma, or Lightroom?
I ask because Photoshop probably wouldn’t have a market if it was introduced in 2026.
What would you be hoping to accomplish by recreating Photoshop?
There is nothing close to Photoshop (or the Affinity suite) that runs natively on Linux. Despite how niche that market is, one could make big bank if they could magically create a valid alternative out of thin air. I’d pay hundreds of dollars for it myself. I don’t even care about PSD compatibility.
(Nope, Krita and GIMP are not good enough)
Okay, well there's a huge difference between Photoshop and Affinity, because Affinity includes an Illustrator and InDesign alternative as well.
What specifically do you need to do in Photoshop? Photo editing? Design? Illustration? It sounds like you have a concrete need if you're willing to part with hundreds of dollars. I've developed a number of graphics apps over the years, so my interest is not academic.
Sure. Where is the vibecoded Figma or Lightroom?
The vibecoded Figma is Google Stitch [0] and Pencil.dev [1] and many others. But that's not what I was asking; I was asking why PS in particular.
Do you use Photoshop? The underlying engine which gives support for layers and smart objects is in itself such an amazing piece of tech that nobody seems to get even close to (and I’ve tried them all). The brush engine is fantastic, liquify and the general support for plugins, and heck, just the basic math behind the filters.
Canva and Figma are layout tools, not for pixel editing.
Recreating it would make it faster and cheaper, something that has been driving software for decades.
I'm not being argumentative; I was genuinely trying to understand why you would aim to recreate Photoshop in particular, because Photoshop includes such a huge range of functionality. If it's about recreating the brush engine, that's pretty achievable. I would be curious to learn why Krita is not enough though.
Context: I've developed multiple Photoshop file format parsers/writers and know Photoshop at a very deep level. And would never want to replicate the specific set of tradeoffs Adobe made in the 1980s.
That’s fair, it’s just that a lot of the functionality overlaps in very rewarding ways, even if you only use the overlap 5% it’s incredibly frustrating to not have that function when you need it
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> definitely not written by an LLM
Are you serious?
This comment couldn’t be more ironic given the content of the post
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.
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.
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.
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...
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/#sec=charts, 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)
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.
Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
One of the bottlenecks right now is testing.
The LLMs suck at testing still, so the feedback cycle still requires human input
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
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)
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.
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.
Where is the "can" coming from? We've seen failed attempts to persuade LLMs to crated a browser, a compiler.
AI cannot take responsibility. It will not indemnify you. My decade is going just fine.
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?
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.
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.
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/)
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-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
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).
Where are the vibe coded Photoshops? Here is a good place to start:
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.
Nobody who wanted to erase a tree or fix their smile paid for Photoshop anyway. and Photoshop does a a lor more than pixel manipulation. So, a moot point.
>So, a moot point.
That's exactly my point. Photoshop is the wrong bellwether with which to test the vibe coding value premise refuted by the author.
It's like asking where all the skyscrapers are when The Home Depot opens up in your neighborhood.
And as someone that's used photoshop professionally for decades, pixel manipulation is precisely what it does.
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.
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
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.
Photoshop?! Where we’re going, we don’t need photoshop.
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
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Performance art.
I'm two weeks into a vibecoded Illustrator, actually (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-horizon....
I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.
30 seconds searching GitHub turned up this: https://github.com/limpy183-dev/Photoshop-clone
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If there was a viable open source replacement for discord I would be using it today.
Same goes for slack.
I was referring to Mattermost, the Slack equivalent, which is quite mature and used at scale by some orgs around me.
There’s zulip https://zulip.com/
That's a SaaS / Product.
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
There’s also Mattermost
The app is open-source, so I guess it would be OK to deploy it yourself and thus register for your own notifications pipeline.
See http//localhost:3000
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.
> WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?
The author seems unwell
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.
Just to be clear, I spent Billions of tokens last month, dick'ing around with AI, do I think it can do my job, sure if I was as checked out as I am feeling being mandated to only use AI for work...
Trust me this version of me can't write code better than an LLM. I think even the LLMs from 2 years ago could do as much.
Only thing we have solved with LLMs is how to generate code, as in literally converting what you type in as text into something somewhat working. Fixing the details is impossible for AI.
Today and beyond.
Same mistakes Indian IT Service firms already did, trusting third-party AI Service providers across every division and department in companies.
Now Open AI and Anthropic are launching own Service firm/wing for maximizing ROI. Direct Competition. Huge Loss for Indian IT Service Firms.
They paid AI providers to Train own automated competition end to end so much so that they are learnt the gaps and how-to own the market by corrections, private IP Source code access and embedded expertise extraction (stopping short of calling it literal corporate espionage, they got all the know-how and especially for modernizing legacy tech and integrations).
They are untrustworthy especially where IP is involved.
Indian and other IT Firms who did not use private self-hosted AI for important things nor monitored the usage and did not train their employees to think what ( or how much) of our institutional knowledge goes out to third-party are already facing trouble.
I couldn't parse all of it, but largely I honestly think software is a sum of it's details you write better software the more details you add to the picture while maintaining simplicity. The art of software is balancing the two.
You can also find this in science, I feel like software is about finding the Gauss’s law for the dozens of electrostatic principles the masses keep coming up with.
AI strips away the need for simplicity by making brute forcing details via verbosity that ruins the need for "good" software, and makes all software by definition unmaintainable since maintainable product as a unit has to be simple enough for a LLM or a human mind to understand.
Currently a human context window is in 100s of billions of tokens, while LLMs seem to max out at 1M.
For anyone thinking but humans can't produce all of the text verbatim, that's the difference b/w humans and machines we can parse and take the most essential parts from 100B token context it's just are speed of prefil and recall is slower. And we memoize learning so if we know X then all variants of X are learnt on the same foundation.
Human learning is so very different from LLMs is so very fascinating as a trad "AI engineer", well some person who has worked and built/shipped ai agents and models at scale.
I accept AI is a tool for a user who knows the fundamentals, and hope it makes the citizen developers or people who are not trained in programming to get more systems thinking. Its best if it makes more programmers when they want to understand the stuff.
Fun analogy Kinda like power tools like are we tightening a screw using a screwdriver or doing it with a power drill. Case in point there is chance of ease as well as more risk while doing it with power drill.
You are absolutely right, it can be guided to produce code but needs corrections like its too easy to create unmaintainable solutions.
Also to untrained eye without good architecture, it does the job but when one who doesn't have architectural skill will think that's enough and there's no more room for improvement. This cause troubles in their production.
Like if it solves their pain points and makes them think systematically and critically. That is better.
What i don't like is giving much information to 3rd party service providers of AI developer tooling LLMs + Copilot and such, which is causing lot of real market level Risk for Indian IT Service Firms and has started costing jobs and literally erosion of market share because the service providers like Open AI launched their own firms like Deploy.Co.
Smaller companies who didn't know any better using tooling and developing stuff and on growth bringing professionals to fix mistakes has been happening long. There are literally companies who made solutions by Access and Sold it to clients, we literally told them even as competitors to compile the things as programs to avoid from future cases of fraud by their Users who were doing shady things.
I expect a coding model being able to clone apps like Photoshop in the next two years. But creating an app like that from scratch without a paragon (which is what Adobe did with Photoshop) is a lot harder.
That actually doesn’t need to happen.
A proxy for it would be we see a huge wave of lay offs.
+ can you even define what is Photoshop? What capabilities does Photoshop have? Ignoring all the edge cases that it supports, what Photoshop allows you to do?
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/kO6Ph
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before vibe coding, this Legend built a free, open, web based Photoshop. It's called photopea.com. best alternative there is
lmao you and me came in and said the same thing, its like slopshop doesn't need to exist because photopea exists.
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.
> the vibecoded OS
What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?
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.
Even before vibe coding I was already using this Photoshop copycat as webapp: https://www.photopea.com/
I think they have a point. But the "QED" at the end leaves a cringe aftertaste
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?
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Feels like AI skipped directly to coding and forgot the creative people who’ve been suffering with Photoshop layers for years
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.
Why should there be?
Why is this the measure of success?
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.
> 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.
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?
Judging by my glimpses inside Adobe, the vibecoded Photoshop is Photoshop.
>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.
> 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.
The vibecoded OS builder (by yours truly) : 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 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.
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.
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
why would anyone vibecode photoshop when AI already makes images
Vibecoding is for scripting, and scripting != software. Not to be confused with cross-language codebase translations.
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
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.
The Canva's "new" Affinity?
Meh, they just merged existing software.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Waiting for people vibe coding their own kernel, go on.
Sending patches to an existing kernel is joining the dots, but do your own!
They mention Vibecoded compiler, here is one: 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.
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.
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.
can all of you say that competitor to photoshop made by AI native teams is impossible in 10 years?
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.
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.
--
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.
The competitors to Photoshop right now are promoted image manipulation tools, not another menus-and-layers based Photoshop clone.
it won't matter by then. There won't be any artists to use them!
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.
If you’re an artist and you feel like your audience was stolen by AI slop, you didn’t have a real audience and you aren’t a real artist.
Go suffer until something good happens in your fingers.
I agree with you, but at the same time I went to university to study music production when Napster just came out. That decimated the music industry forever and I dropped out because I realised I'd made a bad move.
I can totally see how ai could do the same thing to all sorts of art industries that have not had their Napster moment yet.
I can argue that the music industry is decimated not directly by Napster, but their practices and dogmas set ground for it.
For me, even as a broke student "Free!" was not the charm, but "accessibility". I made music, played in orchestras. I know the effort required, and never wanted to steal livelihoods from people, but music before Napster was inaccessible.
Some free radios, expensive CDs and cheap cassettes with bad sound quality. It was impossible to explore and listen a broad spectrum of music.
Now I can try and buy albums. Yes, the publishers still earn way more than the musician, but it didn't start with Napster. It was still like that before Napster.
FWIW, I bought and still buy music rather than streaming it, I'd happily continue doing so. I just want DRM-Free high quality music to listen on various devices of mine, that's all.
It impacted an industry and not an art form?
learn to ~~code~~ weld.
Which doesn't solve or invalidate any of the OP's points.
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.
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.
or they could just learn to weld.
Be first, show us the way. Be the leader of the rebirth of human dignity through welding.
yes, if I ever lose my job to an emerging technology, I will simply find another occupation instead of demanding the reality to bend to my will and that technology to be banned, outlawed, regulated out of existence. unlike the bohemian types, I do not consider myself to deserve some kind of affirmative action bullshit made just for me.
You're missing the forest by assuming "people who think they're unique are complaining for themselves about how technology makes them uncomfortable".
But more power to you and your welder.
and so will tens of thousands of others like you. Good luck finding a job in that scenario. We will soon find out why so many millions of people leave their homes to find better opportunities else where. Except this time there'll be nowhere left to go to. All for "level 1".
FYI Looks like the site is down, the link is returning a 503 Service Unavailable. Probably victim of its own success.
that's why I am doubling down on software stock.
Next twelve months will be interesting in software quality.
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".
It's fascinating to be down voted for this lol
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.
we're all just gonna skim over the fact that this blog is blatantly written by AI? is HN cool with that now
If the crap worked, they would not acquihire coder teams.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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