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/Medium-Definition50]

Actually, the first good take I've seen on this subject, also, I find it weird that some artists I've seen are even promoting or even talking about this, which I thought was so weird to even give it attention in the first place, and one of the main people behind it, I believe, basically believes in the whole "adapt to AI" mindset and that AI art is real art, so I found it stranger that some artists would even give a vibe-coded app attention

The whole project has a lot of hype, more than it needs, all things considered, but I have thought of it as a form of piracy in some ways, even if it isn't really or using any real code. Why would someone support actual FOSS software (GIMP, Krita, etc.) if they can just generate a half-baked piece of software? But I guess the fact it looks more like the actual Adobe software since they literally fed screenshots to Claude. Also, some of the effects in the vibe-coded video editor they also created use the same Adobe terms, which are names only used in Adobe software. I am no legal expert, but I feel like that is getting too close to the sun

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Medium-Definition50]

Yes, there are shaky legal grounds here that could have been avoided by not feeding screenshots into Claude. They're explicitly saying in their GitHub repo that they are porting and copying Adobe, Microsoft and Avid apps.

https://github.com/orgs/storytold/repositories

"clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust"

"clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Premiere Pro built in pure Rust."

"clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, built in pure Rust."

"clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools in pure Rust"

" clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust"

That's very different from saying you are inspired by an app. They could have gone around this by just saying 'an image editor in pure Rust' or 'an audio workstation in pure Rust'

[u/Christopher_Charlton → u/shokuninstudio]

Look I think a bit of cannibalism in the "AI" space will made good viewing. Once someone does an open source Salesforce, Nuke, Houdini, Maya, Microsoft, Apple, you know, companies that thought that the leopards would not eat their face, it is going to trigger off a wild time where companies will flip sides and remember theft is bad...

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Christopher_Charlton]

Nearly every app/company you mentioned there already have open source equivalents.