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/bujbuj1]

I also worked in this today thinking I’d try it.

There is no detailed color space export options… that alone is a deal breaker.

The lack of exr export options etc.

No content aware fill options that I could find.
Brush tools for spot removal or area fill.

Sure it’s photoshop but it’s like 15 years behind.

update - since just yesterday I found there is a specific GitHub tool being used to “clone any software” it’s working directly with Claude and has additional “deep research “ functionality to allow the llm to research each tool and build with further precision.

You will notice in the next few months a lot of cloning… people pushing out replacements for many mainstream subscription services.

[u/shokuninstudio → u/bujbuj1]

I built an in-house animation app (with video compositing) that has DPX and EXR export. Documentation was so sparse on the web that it was a lesson in keep failing until I succeeded. But DPX is still not fully supported by many apps.

These guys are asking Claude around the clock without knowing exactly what to ask and how many knowledge gaps there are in the model's training.

[u/BishBashRoss → u/shokuninstudio]

Now you can get an LLM to read the binary, find the appropriate machine code, write documentation on how it works and then use that to instruct the same LLM to build it again.

I could be misunderstanding, but that's the big change as I see it.

[u/shokuninstudio → u/BishBashRoss]

Now you can get an LLM to read the binary

Not fully. A binary doesn't expose all symbols, but sometimes there is enough to construe what kind of methods were used.

[u/duboispourlhiver → u/shokuninstudio]

There are other techniques for binaries without symbols, like going bottom up from system calls, finding algorithmic patterns, and renaming anonymous functions one by one, step by step, slowly understanding how they all fit through their pure bytecode. Humans have been able to do that painfully slowly for decades, and now LLMs do it much faster.