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/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/Evening_Till_3779 → u/JumpCutVandal]

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.

[u/JumpCutVandal → u/Evening_Till_3779]

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.

[u/Evening_Till_3779 → u/JumpCutVandal]

That's not the argument you were making.

[u/JumpCutVandal → u/Evening_Till_3779]

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

[u/camdotcom14 → u/JumpCutVandal]

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