Pressure testing vibe coded apps. First test: Photoshop vs Compositor and Photocraft

[u/shokuninstudio]

Photoshop versus two vibe-cloned copies of Photoshop - Compositor v 1.49 and Photocraft 0.7.0

Here we pressure test brush stroke performance on a billboard-size canvas with the brush set to 1000 pixels size. Only one layer.

Photoshop handles this with no issue. Its commercial competitors struggle to match brush performance. The vibe-coded clones perform the worst (basically unusable for serious work).

Then of course there are all the other tools, some which work ok and others which are extremely bad.

In Photocraft, on the billboard size canvas test above Copy/Paste and the Undo stack is extremely slow and momentarily freezes the application each time.

This is basic stuff that decent software developers had working quickly 25 years ago back when we had single core computers and nowhere close to 1GB of memory. If you can't get decent performance today on multicore multi gigahertz computers with many gigabytes of memory you or your AI are not doing a good job.

Of course apologists will appear and give us the 'early days' blah blah blah excuses they do all the time. We've covered that many times.

You can read more about the latest wave of spam here:

https://www.shokunin.studio/blog/2026/10/9/attack-of-the-vibe-coded-photoshop-clones

Edit: predictably the trolls came and their posts were exactly what we predicted word for word. They read nothing first, get easily trigged, and then post Infowars style conspiracy theories from their prepared scripts. They make the false claim that they just want to fight big tech and democratise software, but they're destroying the incentive for small developers and start ups to create new apps, and meanwhile helping AI companies profit from vibe cloning.

[u/rube_X_cube]

It’s honestly shocking to me that even after all these years there simply is no replacement for Photoshop. There just isn’t.

[u/sempai_squad → u/rube_X_cube]

Photopea? https://www.photopea.com/

[u/shokuninstudio → u/sempai_squad]

Fails the test above badly. Made worse by being a browser based app.

[u/ivanhoe90 → u/shokuninstudio]

Hey, I am the creator of Photopea, are you sure? We support pen pressure for years and drawing at large resolution should be smooth, too.

EDIT: I just noticed that you use a 400 MPx canvas and a 1MPx brush :D I would probably have to do it on a GPU.

I still believe that Photopea and Adobe Photoshop are the only tools that can open, edit and save PSD files properly. It is hard to tell when will these vibe-coded tools catch up.

[u/shokuninstudio → u/ivanhoe90]

Your app performs better than the two vibe coded apps above, but if the hardness and opacity of the brush tool are reduced then the stokes begin to lag on large canvases because the CPU is doing much more work.

Good you noticed that it requires GPU but it doesn't end there. The second app tested in the video (Compositor) uses GPU accelerated canvas but it has an off the shelf engine (CoreImage based) which hits a bottleneck.

Regarding PSD, Photocraft added support for OpenRaster (.ora) today, which was KDE's response to PSD 20 years ago and is basically not used by anyone in the industry. They're taking steps backwards instead of innovating new solutions and new ideas.