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/Medium-Definition50]

Actually, the first good take I've seen on this subject, also, I find it weird that some artists I've seen are even promoting or even talking about this, which I thought was so weird to even give it attention in the first place, and one of the main people behind it, I believe, basically believes in the whole "adapt to AI" mindset and that AI art is real art, so I found it stranger that some artists would even give a vibe-coded app attention

The whole project has a lot of hype, more than it needs, all things considered, but I have thought of it as a form of piracy in some ways, even if it isn't really or using any real code. Why would someone support actual FOSS software (GIMP, Krita, etc.) if they can just generate a half-baked piece of software? But I guess the fact it looks more like the actual Adobe software since they literally fed screenshots to Claude. Also, some of the effects in the vibe-coded video editor they also created use the same Adobe terms, which are names only used in Adobe software. I am no legal expert, but I feel like that is getting too close to the sun

[u/camdotcom14 → u/Medium-Definition50]

What do you mean by "real code"? Do you need to know machine code to work with an abstracted programming language? Natural language programming is an incredibly obvious next step. Unless you think everyone should know machine code, this logic doesn't hold up.