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Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

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Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#141

Post by swiftcoder »

Retr0id wrote: post #92
darkwater wrote: post #57

I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post. The post author is calling out the "Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?" folks for empty accusations. The "accusers" in their post are THE people asking that question, not the AI users. See this paragraph: > There are no vibecoded Photoshops because vibecoding does not do what the rhetoric claims it does. The accusation itself is th…

Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made

> Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made

The rough argument being made is that a bunch of folks go around lobbing vibe coding accusations at LLM users, because those folks are afraid that LLMs are taking their coding jobs. And that this anger is misdirected, since coding wasn't actually the moat in software development, and LLMs aren't making much of a dent in software architecture or product design.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#142

Post by ben_w »

decimalenough wrote: post #62
altmanaltman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand Photoshop and its business if you think people are replacing it with ChatGPT or Gemini... the point of the article is that the whole "SaaS is dead and AI killed it" media narrative is bs propelled by the ai hype cycle.

That's only half the author's point. The other half is that the "gate is where it always was" (= the part that's not just grinding out code to spec), and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.

Indeed. But:

> the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.

I don't even think this "can't" is even a fact at this point.

24 years ago, my first major academic project, I wrote myself an image editor. In Visual Basic, because the teacher required it, and without version control because I hadn't heard of that when I was 18. It wasn't Photoshop, more like PaintShop Pro without the plugin support and instead with a bunch of baked-in effects, but the experience (and a later attempt to make it into a useful product) showed me how easy it was to separate concerns in that kind of app*, so I think it would be possible if anyone actually cared to try it.

* for each document, you have a fairly simple data structure in the form of an array of layers/groups, each layer has masks etc., but mostly you're building out a huge number of other functions on that data; the hard parts are performance, which AI can also optimise; and that some of these (e.g. smart selection, content aware fill) need some kind of AI to be any good, which again AI can also now create the training system for.

Even re-implementing a JPEG codec from scratch in a stupid language for the task wasn't too painful for me while I was still a university student, and I only did that because my REALBasic-on-a-PPC-mac setup at the time didn't allow me to use libjpeg like a sensible person.

Of course, Adobe also has Creative Cloud and a search engine over stock photography, both of which are essentially entire projects in their own right, and I'd assume also integration with all their other apps.

Proper vector fonts were also out of my scope; that and full backwards compatibility with PSD format, undocumented warts and all, would be my only real question for a vibe-coding attempt.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#143

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

darkwater wrote: post #57

I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post. The post author is calling out the "Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?" folks for empty accusations. The "accusers" in their post are THE people asking that question, not the AI users. See this paragraph: > There are no vibecoded Photoshops because vibecoding does not do what the rhetoric claims it does. The accusation itself is th…

It's a strangely/poorly written article. I've read it a couple of times and am still not 100% clear what the author is trying to say.

As best I can tell, the author is saying that it's unrealistic to expect that a vibecoded photoshop would YET exist since just because you can use AI to help doesn't make the task much easier or quicker. If this is the right take, then I guess he's really talking about AI-assisted development (i.e. AI coding used as a tool by a human developer), rather than "vibe coding" in the sense of "here's some specs - write this for me". With AI as a coding tool, then all the hard work is still left to the human - coding it up once you've specced and designed it was never the hard part.

With Karpathy-style vibe coding - just tell the AI what you want it to build - it's either going to succeed fast or fail fast, so "where is the vibecoded Photoshop" is then a reasonable question, albeit a rhetorical one, reflecting that this type of "gimme X" vibecoding isn't able to produce something of that nature, so of course if doesn't exist.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#144

Post by throwaway2037 »

danilocesar wrote: post #67

Well, not photoshop yet, but if you're in the scene of raw photo editing, you know there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising. It's true that we're not there yet for very complex software, but corporations don't place bets on today's market. They are placing bets on how the market is going to look like 2, 3 years from now.

    > there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising.
Can you share some links?

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#145

Post by vidarh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75

IDK, but I have three or four vibe-coded 0.1%-Photoshops already - small utility apps, all self-contained, client-side, static, zero build-step browser tools, each of them solving a very particular problem for me. Things like, drop an image, get a printable label sheet that force-overrides all margin and scaling settings (recent upgrade to a tool I had that did that with plaintext address data), or metadata-preservin…

Exactly what will eat into PhotoShop etc.

I suspect that if you start seeing vibecoded "PhotoShop alternatives" productised, they won't look like PhotoShop at all: They'll be something like a bunch of image manipulation tools with an agent loop and scripting, to make it easier to create and run a bunch of 0.1%-Photoshops on-the-fly and save/reuse them.

So something more like Claude's artefacts support, just hiding the techie bits for users not comfortable with that, with specialised tooling.

I'm guessing we'll see a bunch of apps like that eating into various traditional big monolithic tools.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#146

Post by alex_smart »

cuechan wrote: post #19

I think they have a point. But the "QED" at the end leaves a cringe aftertaste

Do they really? Do you genuinely that most people asking the "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" question are those who don't understand that "Level 2 and 3 activities" were the real bottleneck or are they trying to explain that to people who don't and are unreasonably expecting a 10x productivity boost out of them?

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#147

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

bayindirh wrote: post #100
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, I didn't feel like addressing the "point" that creatives are higher order beings that must be shielded from harm by everyone else. everyone else's jobs are being automated by machines and computers, outsourced to the third world, and undercut by legal and illegal immigrants. had been for decades. that was fine, this is fine also.

Creatives are not higher order beings. They are human. The thing is, we shouldn't stone creatives for being vocal, instead we should join them and try to protect our dignity and human side rather than accepting what's being forced upon us. Being creative is a different mindset, and is very different from just sitting in front of a computer, bashing keys and doing well-defined things. In fact, high quality software en…

or they could just learn to weld.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#148

Post by bensyverson »

sph wrote: post #96
fugaziboutit wrote: post #6

I think it was in these forums where I first read that you can gauge AI progress by the velocity at which people move the goalposts.

Funny how that works both ways. "I am 100x productive with AI, I can ship in days what took months before" and "oh no, you don't understand, it's not really possible to vibecode Photoshop" found elsewhere in this thread. If I were magically 100x productive, the first thing I would do would be to recreate Photoshop.

Can I ask why? Specifically, why Photoshop and not Canva, or Figma, or Lightroom?

I ask because Photoshop probably wouldn’t have a market if it was introduced in 2026.

What would you be hoping to accomplish by recreating Photoshop?

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#149

Post by bayindirh »

b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #147
bayindirh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creatives are not higher order beings. They are human. The thing is, we shouldn't stone creatives for being vocal, instead we should join them and try to protect our dignity and human side rather than accepting what's being forced upon us. Being creative is a different mindset, and is very different from just sitting in front of a computer, bashing keys and doing well-defined things. In fact, high quality software en…

or they could just learn to weld.

Be first, show us the way. Be the leader of the rebirth of human dignity through welding.
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