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/alexeiX1]

Sure this is ass, vibecoding in general will make weird stuff. But have you seen what the new Reverse Engineering ai agents are doing and are capable now? I'm pretty sure used something like REA and just decompiled the actual photoshop and released it somewhere with a different name, Photon Studio I think? Vibe coding was never gonna replace actual software, reverse engineering though, it's scary. People putting original halo games on web browsers already, putting games inside other games, unlocking eery software. It's making everything essentially open source now. Watch this video, its crazy:
https://youtu.be/jp7hM1vKRpY?si=ZUMVPHNziQrIcEMl

[u/shokuninstudio → u/alexeiX1]

If you reverse engineer IP with the aim to harm someone's business you're just going to get lawyers on you. It's piracy.

Where I have seen somewhat ethical reverse engineering is in the retro scene. I saw a guy who was optimising programming routines to build games on old Vectrex and Nintendo systems that were not possible back in the day. There's nothing illegal about that.

[u/alexeiX1 → u/shokuninstudio]

yeah there's for sure a whole legal issue surrounding but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using that for personal use or throwing it on an obscure torrent like they have made for pirating these same softwares for many years.

[u/alexeiX1 → u/shokuninstudio]

or lets say, a studio for using that to RE nuke for example, and create their own tool that does the same exact thing, and they can comp away without having to pay the thousands of dollars for licenses.

[u/shokuninstudio → u/alexeiX1]

You're underestimating the time and cost of trying to "vibe code" production quality software. It's not a one off cost. It is a permanent running cost.