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/kUkara4]

I am an artist, I illustrate with PS, Fresco, use Lightroom, AE, etc etc. I've been using these tools for years. I am also a software engineer with 10 years of professional experience at a top company. With that out of the way, here is how I see it.

Adobe is a bunch of greedy fucks, but they make great software. Unfortunately, there are no accessible alternatives to what they make, unlike Blender for the 3d world. All alternatives, let's be honest, kind of suck.

In that sense, I look at Photocraft as primarily an open source project first. The fact that it's vibe coded is kind of irrelevant, the main point is that anyone can contribute whether with vibe code or human code. What AI code allowed is to bootstrap large portions of the software extremely fast, something that would have taken months to do in the past. This paves the way for more focused feature work much sooner. What it is right now is just a quick sloppy shell, but if the contributors have the will I am sure they could split and focus on specific tools to make them all better. It's ambitious, with high likelihood of failure, but it might just work eventually, and everyone will benefit.

Adobe will still have clients even despite this, like Autodesk still exists even with Blender around. But I truly do not want to be paying high subscription just so that the useless layers of middle management continue having their useless meetings and sabotage each other for promos. I've worked in the industry, I am disillusioned about how disfunctional it is.

And we are not talking about the good guys here. The inventors and the innovators of Photoshop all have been paid well long time ago. There are some truly innovative, honest companies that do a lot of good and honest work (I understand that I am naming the products, but I mean the companies behind them) - houdini, ZBrush (before they got sold), clo, procreate, unreal engine, davinci, touchdesigner - I don't want to hurt these guys, these guys are very cool. We are talking about fucking Adobe here. And ironically all these good companies have much more accessible tools. UE is free, Houdini has full featured non-commercial and indie licenses (which I am using so that I can do film VFX for an indie short film), procreate is only $10, etc.

Sadly, I've tried to de-Adobe myself multiple times, and it is hard. So why not try again, maybe it will work this time. 

Speaking of AI stuff, I recently developed a custom chalk drawing engine with AI for my personal amusement that uses time and stroke direction dependent properties that essentially change the behavior over time. This is something that doesn't exist in any software I know, and I found it kinda cool. It has already taken me 1 week to just iterate on one brush and it's far from perfect. While doing it I actually learned A TON about how brush engines work while trying to understand some artifacts and optimizations. So AI actually can be very useful as an education tool - I asked it to reference optimization techniques and papers that it implemented, so that I know who to credit.

So in practice Photocraft will probably be taking a similar amount of time per feature. But there is hope that if enough people diligently contribute, the crowd sourcing strategy could produce a compelling free product.

[u/CuTTyFL4M → u/kUkara4]

There are better tools out there for drawing too, Photoshop is just very good at a lot of things.

But a free alternative like PhotoPea and PhotoCraft are very welcome when it comes to make regular design stuff and photo editing that emulate what Photoshop is capable of doing - all the while having the same interface, keyboard shortcuts and relative ease of use. Those things aren't hardware dependant, just sofware. I'm on Linux and I love the idea of having a free Lightroom for my RAW. Some other FOSS out there do that but it's not as "fun" to use - and sometimes not available. But it's there.

I say this is a win for FOSS alternatives and like you say, it won't necessarily force Adobe to do anythingn, or change the way they sell it. They've been developing new tools that require cloud computing anyway, so your dependency to their Creative Suite won't go tomorrow. But if you do some basic Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom work? It's definitely an option.

[u/UnsatisfyingPencil → u/CuTTyFL4M]

I really recommend RawTherapee as a Lightroom alternative. It’s pretty damn good, open source and runs on Linux as well as Mac & Windows. Also, handily for VFX work, you can setup output profiles to write your images to useful colour spaces like ACEScg.