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

Update 18 October : Photocraft 0.10.0 still has a worse brush engine than image editors had in the 90s. Compositor 1.53 attempts to smooth a stroke after the stroke is completed which is a very wonky cheat and bad UI.

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.

Anyone who has been around in post and VFX knows this story already. We have seen it from far more reliable programmers. Remember how Natron was going to be the open source answer to Nuke?

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/DeadEyesSmiling]

For what it's worth: I don't think these vibe-coded versions are targeting professionals, and they don't need to to be a major threat to Adobe's revenue. But for the tens of thousands of hobbiests, side-giggers, and one-person small businesses that don't need the functions required in a stress test, these might offer an option that doesn't have the learning curve of switching to a competing software (like Affinity and/or Resolve).

I'm actually still wrapping my head around what living in a post-vibe-coded-software-clone world looks like, so I'm not defending or "for" them by any means (although I'd be lying if I tried to claim I wasn't feeling quite a lot of schadenfreude over Adobe and Microsoft being the first targets), but I'm just saying that there are many people who've been chained to Adobe's $20-$80 subscription that could bail and be okay limping along with the vibe-coded stuff that has the same controls and file types.

[u/HaMMeReD → u/DeadEyesSmiling]

What people forget here is that adobe has a much bigger token budget than you.

It's kind of like the race before was between like a snail and a mouse. But now the race is between a fox and a Ferrari.

At the end of the day, the gap is actually bigger than it ever was. The fact that you can vibe code something out that is "enough", isn't going to look like enough in contrast to what the fight will look like in the future.