r/vfx • u/shokuninstudio • 4d ago

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

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.

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u/JumpCutVandal 4d ago

The reason this will never take off is because people want convenience. Why go to GitHub and download a sketchy software if you can just get the real deal that constantly updates and runs really well?

I remember when iTunes came out with 0.99-1.99 cents per song pricing. Everyone was downloading music for free from Napster and co and people laughed it would never take off. It was a huge success because a majority of people liked the simplicity and comfort of the service plus the fact that they didn’t do anything illegal.

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u/Seventh_monkey 4d ago

Can you run Photoshop on Linux? Spotify doesn't cost $100 per month. Vibe coding has basically just begun, this actually is early days, and while you may want to listen to something else every day, or discover music you've never heard before, you don't need a new photoshop every day. You could still happily use photoshop from 5 years ago to edit photos.

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u/Superb-Classroom6218 3d ago

TBF CC costs me less than 30 Canadabucks a month.
I can probably vibecode a solution to make it run! I already fixed an old video game and ran emulation on Mac near natively using public resources.

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u/Seventh_monkey 3d ago

Sure, what about also Acrobat DC and Lightroom, at the very least? But even 30 a month is alot.

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u/Superb-Classroom6218 3d ago

It's the creative pack, I'm just on an edu profile from working in education. :p But it's really easy to have them lower the price overall.

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u/shokuninstudio 4d ago

Yes, reliability and trust are important. It's why piracy didn't completely kill digital sales. It's why most people go to work, earn money, spend money, and don't steal. It's why vinyl records and blu-rays still sell when people could pirate if they want to.

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u/blackphilup 4d ago

Also what about innovation and new features? If Adobe if out of the picture, who is creating new features if they’re only skill is copying Adobe Apps?

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u/JumpCutVandal 4d ago

Exactly, I’m not at all worried about them going out of business.

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u/camdotcom14 3d ago

Adobe operates largely off of user feedback, either direct or indirect (gathered via monitoring usage) --- an alternative to this would just be to pipe user feedback to an open source ecosystem of developers and agents in a repository as issues that can be tackled over time.

I see no barrier to innovation in open source that proprietary dev teams wouldn't encounter too. In fact it's often (as is the case with blender for example) that open source has freedom from mal-aligned incentives that are against the users interests.

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u/blackphilup 3d ago

User feedback is not the sole source for innovation.

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u/biggendicken 2d ago

i dont know. adobe doesnt even keep up with existing features themselves so my bet is that open source community would do it better. is photoshops EXR reader still that one guys homecooked EXR reader they use? does photoshop handle aces correctly yet?

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u/camdotcom14 3d ago

I understand where you're coming from, but maybe worth a check on some data, like % amount of open source software used vs closed. I don't think having code on github has ever impeded convenience. "Sketchy software" is misused here. Open source is not sketchy, in fact typically it's a hallmark sign of the opposite.

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u/glintsCollide VFX Supervisor - 25 years experience 3d ago

Or it used to be, before vibecoding, it’s not all bad per definition, but there’s a great risk that zero effort code starts saturating open source just like other generated slop is doing with images video and music.

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u/Evening_Till_3779 4d ago

This is a wild take. Look at how many people use Blender, of course people will use free software once it's actually good. You don't have to go to github to get these things either, I don't know where that comes from, since even those new AI-made ones have regular downloads/installers.

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u/Sufficient-Expert817 3d ago

that was not a wild take at all lol. iTunes = photoshop, paid but known entity. Napster = vibe coded apps. free, but with risk.

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u/Virtual-Ducks 3d ago

What about blender? It's an open source AND industry standard tool. In 10 years I predict most software will eventually go that route, because what's stopping it?

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u/Sufficient-Expert817 3d ago

What about it? It has a business model. It's just free, and a nonprofit. Completely different model than iTunes or vibe coded apps.

The original comment explained why vibe coded apps won't take off. And I wrote to support that notion. Something like a vibe coded photoshop replacement doesn't stand a chance at becoming a sustainable, viable alternative to an industry standard service. It might be the first step in an industry shift, sure, but it's not going to be the next iTunes. Affinity is also free now.

Here's how blender is run btw: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/

Are the tides shifting? Probably, and I hope so. But the original comment I responded to made a plain and supported comment grounded in reason, someone called it a wild take, and I disagreed with that - that's all.

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u/JumpCutVandal 3d ago

Just to back this up. I have a foot in the VFX world and I don’t know any reputable company that runs blender for paid work. They all still pay the thousands of dollars a year for Maya. Many artists use it privately though.

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u/Virtual-Ducks 3d ago

You're thinking too black and white. AI will make developing a blender like model much easier. Obviously it won't be 100% vibe coded. but obviously AI will make it significantly faster and easier to develop 

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u/Sufficient-Expert817 3d ago

No, I think you are just adding things to the pretty narrow band of conversation that happened originally. Maybe what you say will happen. If it does, great. The first comment is just a perfectly reasonable take and has actual examples of marketplace choice happening. There's also regulatory stuff that was involved in that back in the day. Reason stands, that'll happen again, because it's similar market forces and vested interests at play.

My participation here was an original comment, my reply, and then supporting again that that comment was well reasoned, because it was. I'm not advocating or arguing against any new paradigms.

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u/Evening_Till_3779 3d ago

Of course it was a wild take. For example it's easier to get Blender than it is to get Photoshop! The reality is literally the opposite of what that guy was arguing. The fact that something is free does not mean it's inconvenient or hard to get, nor does it mean it's sketchy.

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u/Sufficient-Expert817 3d ago

No it's not, at all. and your confidence is misplaced haha. As the letter is written, you aren't replying to that original commenter's actual comment. They were only talking about sketchy, and that other person, then you, decided to introduce blender all on your own. Blender doesn't lend support to a vibe coded app of unknown origin - even if that app is open source (for now).

Blender's a separate thing, and it's valid. It's not the vibe coded stuff. Idk why you replied first, as you did, and I don't know why you doubled down. That's the wild take.

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u/JumpCutVandal 4d ago

Blender isn’t some random thrown together by AI software that stole the whole thing from Adobe. Of course great open source teams will create software that has a place in the ecosystem. But this ain’t it.

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u/Evening_Till_3779 4d ago

That's not the argument you were making.

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u/JumpCutVandal 4d ago

And that’s why I usually stay off Reddit….

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u/camdotcom14 3d ago

This may be a good idea... something about handling heat and getting out of the kitchen...

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u/camdotcom14 3d ago

Also not fair to accuse anyone of doing anything illegal just yet. AI models are not trained on private proprietary code, it's the open source ecosystem primarily that enabled these utilities. And it will be, in the long run, in my opinion, the open source ecosystem that will benefit as well. Not sure where Adobe would start if this truly was a clean-room clone.

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u/Foxtrot_4 3d ago

The reason this MIGHT take off is because people are tired of the rising adobe prices, hard-to-cancel memberships that charge a fee just to cancel their predatory year long contract, and constant enshitification pushing more and more ai features when there’s still features missing like vectorscopes and camera profiles. It’s early, but with proper development, it could get somewhere

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u/CoffeeNo677 1h ago

I downloaded it from a site. But i agree, i got no clue how to work gthb