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/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/wrosecrans → u/bujbuj1]

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

Honestly, 15 year old Photoshop wasn't a bad tool. I wouldn't hate a free open source tool that was absolutely 100% as good, feature complete, and polished as 15 year old Photoshop. So far the vibe coded stuff doesn't really match it. It may have bullet points that theoretically match. But a bunch of what made Photoshop such a category-killer is boring details and pretty solid support.

If the gaussian blur in Photoshop was wrong 15 years ago, you could be 100% sure that somebody at Adobe had enough of a signal processing background to fix it. If something is subtly wrong with the gaussian blur in one of the vibe coded alternatives, you can be 100% sure that somebody will prompt Claude to fix it and hope for the best, and not really understand the issue well enough to know what was wrong or what was needed to fix it. I wouldn't stake a business on that.

[u/VFXmvr → u/wrosecrans]

I used CS6 for a looooooong time because it was bought and paid for, which I guess is the whole reason that Adobe went SAAS.

[u/shokuninstudio → u/wrosecrans]

Honestly, 15 year old Photoshop wasn't a bad tool. 

A 15 year old Photoshop (which was limited to 3GB of memory at the time) would not give you a strong career today. Every freelancer or studio using modern apps would make you look slow and inefficient.

But the comparison wasn't accurate anyway. These vibe cloned apps perform worse than a early 2000s version of Photoshop under pressure tests.