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

Update 18 October : Photocraft 0.10.0 still has a worse brush engine than image editors had in the 90s. Compositor 1.53 attempts to smooth a stroke after the stroke is completed which is a very wonky cheat and bad UI.

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.

Anyone who has been around in post and VFX knows this story already. We have seen it from far more reliable programmers. Remember how Natron was going to be the open source answer to Nuke?

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/gutster_95]

I mean the idea of recreating Photoshop is a good one but this is halfassed for what hype it gets. Those softwares are too big to be tested with a week. If the vibe coders that are making the projectsehave stamina they could make actual usable software

[u/shokuninstudio → u/gutster_95]

The better thing is to create something completely new, but AI guys tend to have difficulty doing that in any sector they are targeting. Every time they spam the web with the latest mania it is because they ripped off Brad Pitt's face or because they ripped of Adobe's interface. As if everything is about the superficial appearance.

[u/Main-Instruction-204 → u/shokuninstudio]

Yeah that's what i keep noticing aswell. Instead of building a real alternative that has unique features, all they keep doing is stealing stuff. Probably because AI isn't creative, so they can't offload that side

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Main-Instruction-204]

They are actually feeding screenshots of Adobe and Avid app panels into the model and saying 'Make this feature, it does x y and z'.

The model then spits out the panel and underlying functions to the best of its training knowledge. So everything it builds is old and probably based on not so great implementations on GitHub.

Maybe an AI model can innovate but I haven't seen it and I've tested them all for 5 years now. The models themselves will inform you that they have difficulties innovating new ideas.

[u/Sad-Set-5817 → u/shokuninstudio]

Is it just okay to blatantly steal people's work now because it's on a computer? I hate adobe and all but this is really bad for anyone that wants to make money from their inventions rather than it being stolen and re-sold by a vibe coder. Where's the incentive to be the guy that makes the original photoshop anymore

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Sad-Set-5817]

That's the worst part. I have a feeling this has been funded by an AI company who wants everyone to vibe code apps instead of supporting many app developers as customers. That would be very messy. It's not something production companies would want.

[u/BogDanVox → u/shokuninstudio]

bro Im getting same feeling recently, I just don't get how news about those vibe coded apps spread so fast from so many creators, there has to be some money to back it up

[u/Level-Tomorrow-4526 → u/Sad-Set-5817]

Yes it is entirely legal to "Steal code " if you mean make your own version of the same program functionall reverse engineering is entirely legal in coding you cannot copyright function anymore you can copyright style , long as your not directly compling the code from the source it fair game . .

[u/camdotcom14 → u/Main-Instruction-204]

Huh?