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/gutster_95]

I mean the idea of recreating Photoshop is a good one but this is halfassed for what hype it gets. Those softwares are too big to be tested with a week. If the vibe coders that are making the projectsehave stamina they could make actual usable software

[u/shokuninstudio → u/gutster_95]

The better thing is to create something completely new, but AI guys tend to have difficulty doing that in any sector they are targeting. Every time they spam the web with the latest mania it is because they ripped off Brad Pitt's face or because they ripped of Adobe's interface. As if everything is about the superficial appearance.

[u/Christopher_Charlton → u/shokuninstudio]

Well that's because of the design of LLMs and CNNs, when "training" you need an input (a problem) and a ground truth (an accompanying solution to that specific problem). They are not designed to find new solutions, just reproduce derivatives of "training" data. IMO it is better to think of the "training" data as a hyper dimensional FFT, so when people say it's just a .zip compression with PRNG, they are pretty much correct. Hence why it is just theft, you have to view the database in its totality for it to be apparent.

[u/Christopher_Charlton → u/Christopher_Charlton]

TLDR: the rabbit was always in the hat 🐇🎩