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Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

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Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#331

Post by zeroonetwothree »

saulpw wrote: post #320
jeroenhd wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder. Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.

Similarly, it seems like people are finding out the hard way that coding is the easy part and software design/architecture is much harder.

It was always the hard part, hence why experienced eng get paid 5-10x what new grad do. It’s not because they type faster.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#332

Post by zeroonetwothree »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #255
joenot443 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Practically speaking it’s rarely cost efficient to vibe code your own all compared to buying. It might cost $100-200 in tokens alone and then there’s the time cost, maintenance, etc. Paying $10/month is cheaper.

I’ll only make an app if there’s nothing else comparable out there (surprisingly common)z

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#333

Post by submeta »

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…

100%. This is what’s happening with agentic coding. We develop individual solutions tailored to our needs. We don’t need one-stop shops anymore.

For instance I have created a snippet manager, because I didn’t like the one in Raycast. Or I have created a journal viewer because the daily notes in Obsidian are not easily viewed across days. And so I have dozens of smaller solutions that are tailored to my needs. And I am guessing lots of vibe coders do the same.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#334

Post by vunderba »

ACCount37 wrote: post #178
ben_w wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually. As per https://xkcd.com/1015/ , I suspect many people are doing this and the artists hate all the examples even more than the average consumer who simply treats it as a sign of low-budget work. M…

The recent ChatGPT Images 2.0 has awe-inspiring image editing and composition capabilities. I can totally see what people mean when they say "Photoshop killer".

Yup. You still have to do some manual work if you want to create something like a comic and make sure each panel is internally consistent with the world. Heck, even OpenAI’s own cookbook demonstration of the dog comic was a complete mess. I ended up having to make a lot of manual edits just to fix it.

I also think most people fall into the Fiverr camp: they need something that’s “good enough,” and don't have a particularly critical eye for detail - in which case even one-shotting with the latest models, gpt-image-2 or nb2 can get you there.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#335

Post by potsandpans »

What the author is missing is that the world is swimming with single purpose apps that don't need to be published.

An example:

I do game dev as a hobby, and target the browser as the platform.

Before I would shim general purpose tools into the development lifecycle because I was more interested in building games not tools. Now, I'm accumulating tiny single purpose tools that fit my usecases much more closely.

Where before it would be super expensive and probably inappropriate to create tightly coupled tools to a single data model / usecSe now it's super cheap, just part of the sdlc.

The end result for me is a much more ergonomic and taylor fit experience that helps me achieve my end goal. Am I going to release these tools? Absolutely not. It wouldn't make sense for anyone outside of potsandpans' gamedev loop.

So, I think this accusation is a bit "old world" thinking. I don't expect to see a million photo shops. There's already general purpose photo editing software: photoshop and gimp. I _might_ expect to see savvy devs and artists using photoshop less and using custom tools more. We might not even see or hear about that, other than when photoshop sales drop.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#336

Post by asielen »

thisisit wrote: post #315
bradley13 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I have an acquaintence who is a wine connoisseur and collector. He has done technical project management, but does not program himself. Over the course of several months, he has produced an app that manages a database of the wines he has. It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fi…

So the future is - Everyone has their own apps built specifically for their own use case and spending tokens just for the satisfaction to have created something themselves? That sounds like a tool for hobbyists. I have no clue about wine connoisseur apps but I have to assume that someone some where has build apps to manage the obvious data and now integrating AI into it so that it can do photo to text and reports and…

Yeah, I think I agree with your assessment.

Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.

I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.

A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.

A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.

Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.

And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.

These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#337

Post by itomato »

tim-projects wrote: post #115
itomato wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re an artist and you feel like your audience was stolen by AI slop, you didn’t have a real audience and you aren’t a real artist. Go suffer until something good happens in your fingers.

I agree with you, but at the same time I went to university to study music production when Napster just came out. That decimated the music industry forever and I dropped out because I realised I'd made a bad move. I can totally see how ai could do the same thing to all sorts of art industries that have not had their Napster moment yet.

It impacted an industry and not an art form?

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#338

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

That sounds correct to me. I vibe-coded an app that creates a stereo pair from .mpo files for viewing on an antique stereoscope [1]. Is there anything more niche than that?

[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#339

Post by kjkjadksj »

swatcoder wrote: post #298
bradley13 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I have an acquaintence who is a wine connoisseur and collector. He has done technical project management, but does not program himself. Over the course of several months, he has produced an app that manages a database of the wines he has. It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fi…

> 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time Six months of fiddling and $X00 in subscription/token fees to make a DIY inventory management app that's going to need regular attention and revision, with ongoing service fees, to accommodate not-quite-right implementations and hidden technical debt. That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution. The industry needs to deliver on a lot mor…

I know right and after 6 months it is an app managing a database with some ocr functionality. 6 months for that? I get the wine guy couldn’t do this beforehand, but in the “old days” of say 6 years ago this is the sort of thing you might build after a 60 minute tutorial…

Re: Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

#340

Post by kjkjadksj »

beej71 wrote: post #278
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…

I think there's some low-hanging money to be made with a nearly-feature-complete PS clone.

Your competition, gimp, is free already.
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