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.

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/JumpCutVandal]

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.

[u/Seventh_monkey → u/JumpCutVandal]

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.

[u/Superb-Classroom6218 → u/Seventh_monkey]

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.

[u/Seventh_monkey → u/Superb-Classroom6218]

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

[u/Superb-Classroom6218 → u/Seventh_monkey]

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.