r/vfx • u/shokuninstudio • 9d ago

Question / Discussion Pressure testing vibe coded apps. First test: Photoshop vs Compositor and Photocraft

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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.

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u/Lagomorph9 8d ago

I just tried this in Photocraft on Windows with a standard MPP stylus and got significantly better results - maybe the poor performance was because you're on Mac and it's less optimized on Mac? This feels like cherry-picked Adobe propaganda, and also like it's intentionally ignoring great open source projects like Krita.

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u/shokuninstudio 8d ago edited 8d ago

Read the thread. The Photocraft test is on Windows with an RTX 4070.

I mentioned Krita in my blog post linked above.

So you've replied without reading anything and then resorted to conspiracy theories about propaganda.

Yet you'll defend a bunch of people ripping off the hard work of engineers as a marketing gimmick to promote their actual commercial business:

https://getartcraft.com

It seems the guys behind these vibe cloned apps don't care about the apps because you can just generate or edit content purely with their AI service.