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Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

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Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#251

Post by swiftcoder »

rimliu wrote: post #240
swiftcoder wrote: post #3

Not quite the direction I expected that to take, but I do agree with the broad strokes. LLMs lowering the cost of code isn't exactly solving software development, and is definitely not solving product development.

Lowering the cost at subsidized pricing. For how long?

Honestly pretty hard to tell. We know that US firms are heavily subsidising their subscription pricing vs their per-token pricing, but we're much less clear to what extent the token prices themselves are subsidised, let alone whether the cheaper open-weights models coming out of Chinese firms are being subsidised (and to what end?).

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#252

Post by techpression »

bensyverson wrote: post #148
sph wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you use Photoshop? The underlying engine which gives support for layers and smart objects is in itself such an amazing piece of tech that nobody seems to get even close to (and I’ve tried them all). The brush engine is fantastic, liquify and the general support for plugins, and heck, just the basic math behind the filters.

Canva and Figma are layout tools, not for pixel editing.

Recreating it would make it faster and cheaper, something that has been driving software for decades.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#254

Post by hammeiam »

jofzar wrote: post #199

Im suprised no one has said its because photopea exists? Like of all the products OP could have chosen, photoshop shouldn't have been the one that is chosen because it actually has a good clean competitor to it in the "free" category that theoretically slopshop would replace. https://www.photopea.com/

Photopea is such an amazing project. Pre-AI solo dev, too.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#255

Post by hombre_fatal »

joenot443 wrote: post #211
netdevphoenix wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI. No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs. What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening…

> neither will the one off random app that only your household uses This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer. Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic.…

The people empowered by AI don't have to be nontechies, just everyone who has the will for an app to exist but didn't have the means (like interest) to yak-shave into a software engineer just to build one.

It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.

Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.

I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.

Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.

As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.

The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#256

Post by jaffa2 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95
PunchyHamster wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people subscribe to photoshop for just occasional image edits. It's very much a tool mostly used by professionals that do a lot of it

Back in the day when a license was expensive, then yes, you either were a professional who used it a lot, or like the rest of us poors, you used a cracked copy. Nowadays though, with relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their so…

> relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription,

Sorry what? This is nonsense.

> as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.

ahh there's the rub.

So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.

So what about the folk who don't use it professionally and have no access to cracked copies anymore ?

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#257

Post by dannersy »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #193
stevex wrote: post #34

I don't think that's the direction this is going to take. Replacing a mature app with an incredibly wide audience and a million use cases may or may not be possible, but what's actually happening is that people are making an app that does exactly what they want, and using it to solve their own needs. Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract fi…

Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI. No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs. What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening…

> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.

> reducing the cost

The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#258

Post by throwaway85825 »

moregrist wrote: post #248
poszlem wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of the current startups could be done with a speadsheet and yet they earn money.

The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling. It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, the data grows 10x and emailing spreadsheets back and forth becomes too error prone, or any other of the well-known ways that this falls apart. Those of us in software always cringe…

Institutional knowledge is just valued at $0.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#259

Post by marking-time »

carlosjobim wrote: post #191
Hard_Space wrote: post #112

I need Photoshop for an almost vanishingly small subset of all the things it is capable of, and this holds true for nearly all 'full-fledged' software that I use. So what may not be surfacing, in the absence of vibe-coded Photoshops, is the growing local script collections of many users. Since I have had AI to knock up Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG, I have devolved a lot of t…

There are no downsides for the customer if the software is much more capable than what the user needs. So there's not much of a business case for offering software with less features.

The use case for less capable software is that it is cheaper. Why buy a mansion when all you need is a bedroom?

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#260

Post by [deleted] »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #193
stevex wrote: post #34

I don't think that's the direction this is going to take. Replacing a mature app with an incredibly wide audience and a million use cases may or may not be possible, but what's actually happening is that people are making an app that does exactly what they want, and using it to solve their own needs. Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract fi…

Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI. No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs. What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening…

[deleted]
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