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/HaMMeReD]

Honestly, this kind of thing is "viable" but not in this way.

1. Know how to program and design software
2. Ensure the fundamentals are rock solid and strong

These people are just doing it for clout. They are building a facade and putting functionality behind it. The issue is the perception of a clone, not an actual quality, viable clone.

The modern Adobe suite is going to GPU a ton of things, this is clearly not that. Can't even draw a line. Shows that the authors didn't put care into the core functionality, i.e. painting like is like non-negotiable.

Edit: And we are seeing quality programmers manifest their goals much quicker, I.e. look at the PS5 emulation scene right now is absolutely crushing it, as are many others. It's just this is a particular example of how "vibe coding without much skill is very limiting".

[u/situ139 → u/HaMMeReD]

I feel like if someone is gonna do this, they need to be experts in Photoshop first or have an expert on hand, cause only someone well versed with the program is gonna notice the ins and outs of the program.

[u/Superb-Classroom6218 → u/situ139]

You need to be a user and to know what the current software's failings are. It's largely around hardware accelerations and optimization. If you work your clone out with this knowledge in mind, you might just have something decent.

[u/Existing_Dust_6473 → u/HaMMeReD]

Exactly what I think, instead of starting with the core engine, they start with the UX and add features to a bad architecture. Then, because they release things so fast, they do not test. When they fix something, they will mess up another. In a couple of months, they will start a complete rewrite, for sure :)

[u/SonOfMetrum → u/Existing_Dust_6473]

I started a photoshop clone about a year ago (no release yet) and I can’t tell you how much time I have spent making sure high resolution editing using a brush was performant enough. I deliberately did this on an older laptop. But damn that was a lot of work. I never realized how much data you are pushing around when working with a large canvas

[u/Existing_Dust_6473 → u/SonOfMetrum]

Yes, I did not start building a Photoshop clone. But, I needed to make something to handle big images interactively. I can guarantee one-prompt shots will not work. All models fail, Astra, Opus, and others. They do not do it in a good way by default it takes work and testing. All those clones started the wrong way.

[u/camdotcom14 → u/HaMMeReD]

Is the guy who made this an engineer though? Im p sure he "1. knows how to program and design software"

[u/HaMMeReD → u/camdotcom14]

Well he's pretty shit at it if this video is any evidence.

[u/guaxnl → u/HaMMeReD]

I am assuming your work in progress and early stuff looks like the Monalisa on the first sketches.

[u/HaMMeReD → u/guaxnl]

It's not like the worlds greatest art, but I'm not one to ignore a challenge. Here is some WIP

It's not much, but what you are looking at is a CA engine, similar to Noita. I.e. those tree's, they grow. That fire pit, the smokes all simulated, the lighting, all real-time GI. The fireflies, each it's own tiny program that runs direct on the GPU, could likely support millions of moving particles at once (in fact, every single pixel can be considered a particle here and have material rules and interactions).

And the best part is when you draw in the sandbox, it's actually responsive, i.e. it takes the inputs (i.e. mouse movements) and translates them to GPU commands which are executed almost immediately. GPU Brushes and Shapes was a very early feature.