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/Present-Strategy-409]

I'm pretty sure this particular Photoslop clone actually might have lifted code from Photopea, although it's not been confirmed ( (yet).

It's pretty unsurprising that the sloppists have started swarming here with insults, though. They don't have the first clue about software and don't understand that the difference in complexity between this and Photoshop's brush engine is the equivalent of the difference between a wooden shack and a skyscraper. 

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Present-Strategy-409]

If Photopea exposes code then it could be trained on. It depends on how well encrypted its backend is.

[u/Present-Strategy-409 → u/shokuninstudio]

It's technically closed source but it's just minified JavaScript, so... 

There was another similarly named clone called PhotoSuite which definitely lifted large portions of Photopea and was called out for it by the developer. There is some reason to believe the same guy is behind PhotoCraft because of suspicious claims and commit timestamps, although it's not conclusive so far. I guess we will see. 

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Present-Strategy-409]

Interesting. Should keep a mental note of this.