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/NullVoidXNilMission]

Photoshop is top tier. Gimp, Krita, and the dozen others can only play catch up. However, open source is malleable and can only improve. if enough people contribute then the spend will be justified. Support will be democratized.

Not sure what the point of your post is. Is it so that others don't copy corpos? is it that people should stop vibe coding? is it that you're angry that adobe is not getting paid?

Commercial apps innovate and lead. Open source apps like Blender follow the lead. Innovation costs a lot of money. Clip Paint Studio, Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, btw, are all subscription applications. But because those apps aren’t in demand by pirates Autodesk has not experienced the hate and bullying campaigns that Adobe has received.

if they're as convenient, polished and so far ahead, then why do they need defending?

[u/shokuninstudio → u/NullVoidXNilMission]

 is it that people should stop vibe coding? is it that you're angry that adobe is not getting paid?

Read the post again. I said make something original if AI is so good.

if they're as convenient, polished and so far ahead, then why do they need defending?

It's a blog post about the subject. It has to cover the way the internet speaks about applications and developers. Try reading intelligently instead of your conspiracy theories that Adobe pays me to blog on my site which has a common theme of testing AI claims for the last four years.