shokunin.studio
Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones
Over the last several months I have been tracking AI guys trying to create vibe coded clones of popular apps, especially Adobe’s apps which have always been the most pirated apps since the 90s.
1. There are now about a dozen vibe coded attempts to clone Photoshop and some other Adobe apps, not including dozens of forks of them.
2. The amount being spent in AI tokens (API costs) is in the thousands of dollars per project.
3. The largest attempt to vibe clone Adobe’s apps has over 70 devs using Claude to submit 100s of pull requests per day. The amount they are spending on tokens must be over $50,000 in the last two weeks. I will not name this project and don’t want to give them traffic that they do not deserve.
4. Yet despite this not one of these vibe coded projects has been able to create a brush engine that matches Photoshop’s brush engine. The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera.
5. Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job.
6. Brush performance aside, each of these projects struggle with 100% file format compatibility and lossless images editing. So instead of innovating and pushing forward they have successfully rewinded the clock back to 1996 when there was a lack of industry standardisation and quality.
7. They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
8. They rant and claim the era of subscription software is finished, but they are subscribed to AI services and AI software. The amount they are paying to AI companies is far higher than the cost of Adobe, Autodesk, Canva or Maxxon applications, and the result is barely usable vibe coded apps that will need to be continually maintained at high cost.
9. Vibe coders brag about their app binaries being much smaller than Adobe’s app binaries, as if that has something to do with the quality of the code. It does not. Application code (which is just text) takes up very little disk space in any application. What takes up the most amount of disk space are the frameworks, libraries, models and media assets an app ships with. The more advanced and capable an app is the larger it will become. But the size on disk is largely irrelevant in the age of terabyte+ size disks. The size of an app in memory, the app’s performance and its stability are how you judge the quality of an application.
10. Continuing from the last point, they and internet commentors have often made claims that Adobe’s apps have “bloat” in them, but if you ask them to qualify what they mean by bloat they cannot. They will revert to application binary size again. These are mostly people who have no knowledge of programming and parrot each other. An app either has good quality code that performs well or it doesn’t. An app can have tons of redundant functions in it but functions do not run unless they are called by a tool.
11. Whether software is vibe coded or not, open source software has rarely challenged commercial software. Krita has been around for years and is a decent application, but Clip Studio Paint’s subscriptions earn Celsys millions of dollars a year. Nobody is giving up Clip Studio Paint for software that has rough edges. Blender is a fantastic application, but Cinema 4D and Maya are still the 3D animation applications of choice for larger studios and commercial productions. They lead, Blender tries to follow.
12. And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
The saddest part in all this is how it feeds into the ignorance and online hate campaign against Adobe that we have seen in the last 5 or so years. Some have labelled it ‘Adobe derangement syndrome’, but whatever it is it is a mix of stock market manipulation (some admit it) and anger that Photoshop has been getting harder to pirate ever since cloud services were integrated into Adobe’s application suite. We should clear the air here.
Subscription software exists when cloud services and cloud compute are integrated into a software suite. It is the only way to pay for the running costs at wide scale. If you remove these modern services there is limited progress in software development. You'll have to move all high cost compute locally which is impractical because most users cannot afford a high end workstation GPU or cloud server.
Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger.
If they have an issue with companies being large, they now have the tools to compete against them. But instead of vibe cloning poor quality rip offs why not build new original creative applications around fresh ideas that have never been tried before?
