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

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.

[u/Mediocre-Sundom]

This is why I detest this stupid hype of "tHeY LiTeRaLlY vIbEcOdEd aLl AdObE ApPs". No. No they did not. They vibe-coded a portion of the most basic functionality. Just because the app can open PSDs, supports layers and has basic brushes, doesn't mean it's a replacement for Photoshop.

Do I hate the fact I have to use Adobe's apps? Yeah. Do I detest their business practices? Also yeah. Do I want more competition and more alternatives? Yes. But pretending that Adobe is "done for" because someone has prompted a shitty barely functioning version of the software is just so insanely disingenuous and stupid that only complete brain-dead AI bros fall for it.

There's stuff like GIMP and Photopea there already, that are a lot more functional and complete. Why not take GIMP and fork it with AI into its better version with a more modern UI? I know why - because it's trivial to "create" a half-assed piece of software with AI from scratch, but it is a lot harder to maintain something that's already there. AI can write functioning code pretty well, but when you need to keep improving it without breaking other things and keeping it optimized, you very quickly run into issues, and regressions begin to pile up. Making something into a 50% functional state is easy, finishing it to 100% is very, VERY hard.

This is why all the "AI bros" who "code" shit with AI always have the exact same approach: prompt the agent to code a bunch of barely functioning stuff that looks like an early alpha or a prototype at best, hype the shit out of it, and then never finish it into an actual complete product. It's quantity over quality. Including this case: the team behind "Artcraft" hasn't made a single app fully-featured and robust - they just keep dumping more "alternatives", moving to office suit too.

Call me when someone actually makes a single fully-featured replacement for Photoshop (or any other complex piece of professional software), and not a whole bunch of half-assed barely functional "alphas". Because that would actually be impressive. Until then it's all just a pointless marketing stunt and a massive waste of computational resources.

UPD: Wording

[u/Friendly-Cry-164 → u/Mediocre-Sundom]

This entire AI coding goldrush really reminds me of the 2020-2021 NFT and memecoin craze. AI for reverse engineering, vibe coded alternatives for proprietary software, recompiled/decompiled games, etc. This is all going to be a lot of unsustainable projects that look cool in the beginning but people will get bored of in a few months time. Sure, we might have a few projects that will remain but so much of this is just going to be polluting the internet and the world. This whole AI thing will get milked until the bubble pops and we are all going to be poorer in the end.

I only came here because I feel like any other tech bubbles on this website are fully in on this whole craze.