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 findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data. No Excel required.
Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. 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.
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 to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.
Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.
Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.
Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.
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 fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional.
This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.
what about the data? is it locally hosted? if he drops his phone everything will be lost?
or are servers and databases involved? if so, where are they being hosted? how did he manage those?
even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.
I was just talking to a friend of mine who has been making webapps for himself in a similar fashion. Very little to no programming experience. His first app scans his course notes (med school) and creates structured question banks. He's released it so everyone at his school can sign up with their institutional email. The front end is hosted with vercel and the backend with supabase.
He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.
Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.
I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.
If someone has any curiosity, they can ask the AI about this and it will engineer a solution, like use iCloud or some free tier service.
After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.
I was writing a comment about the durability of this app, but you beat me to it. Something tells me that the burden of maintaining this thing through various OS updates, security policy changes (from Apple and Google), new devices, etc. is going to be frustrating for him. It's great that he vibecoded something useful to him in this moment, but I do think these stories are "counting their chickens before they hatch" so to speak.
So LLMs are the 3d printers of software. Great for niche use-cases without enough market demand for a proper solution, and generally scale very poorly vs proper industrial processes.
We saw this happening for our SAAS stack we used, why pay for a massive SAAS tool with a huge surface area when we only used the desk+room booking and payment. Before building something like this was such a huge cost now it's becoming palatable
> 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.
My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror.
Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p...
That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
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".
Because then you have chosen a non-deterministic action when a deterministic action would do, thus making it more expensive, more prone to failure, and just more annoying to use.
Would you rather press a button and go through a simple process that's normalized across all crud apps or talk to a chatbot every time you want to solve a problem and invoke external apis?
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 social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
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.
Photoshop (and many traditional SaaS products) solve hundreds of different use cases. Most users probably only care about a handful of them. You don't need to do every use case to kill SaaS if you have a tool that can allow users to solve their 2-3 use cases on their own with custom tooling.
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.
> 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.
I think its also possible, but non-technical people likely wont hill climb high enough to make this unless they are extremely motivated. Using abstraction properly to effect change, understanding breaking down the problem to extreme details and building them back up one by one. I think most of the people using AI for one shot type of things don't even know what "content aware fill" is even if they used it.
And the point of the comment you are answering is that the market you are talking about has taken on a different form.
The difference is that normally, people would perhaps pay a company to buy a PS license, or pay a professional to edit their images, however now this market segment will just use VLMs to edit the image to what they need.
It goes beyond that. It's becoming cheaper and easier to e.g. vibecode tools to carry out the handful of uses lower end users may have for PS. Some users will do that directly. Some users will turn that into services or apps. PS will be weakened by thousands of small cuts, not one large vibecoded abomination.
Some of those tools will use VLMs to provide more advanced features instead of implementing it themselves, making competing for a broader subset of users feasible.
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 the vibe. The accuser feels that a thing must have been easy because it was made with AI. They post that feeling as if it were a finding. The finding never has to be checked, because nobody else checks it either. The accusation travels because it feels right, not because it is right. Big difference.
> The accusation that someone produced unverified output is itself being produced as unverified output
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.
Yeah it has a confusing clickbait title that gives the wrong impression of what the article is about. His point is that the bottleneck to making a complex app like photoshop is architectural rather than just writing basic code… and he argues the LLMs don’t magically make the architectural part easier.
This is the first time in my life I have ever felt the need of an LLM to understand an article. Even after understanding the overall gist of the article (thanks ChatGPT!), I still can't make head or tail of many sentences and find many questionable choices made in the way the article was structured.
e.g.
>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.
This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.
Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.
> I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post.
That's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.
> 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.
This is what usually happens with LLM assisted writing. Looking at other posts in author blog, they are as well likely written with help and guidance of LLM bot, and also bring feeling of incoherence when read.
I'd say this style predates LLM by millenia so it is not really invented by bots. To me it resembles the most the older religious texts and especially oral preaching. Some of attractors in current frontier models are likely coming from religious areas of knowledge, since this apocalyptic incoherence is found in so many texts today.
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-preserving image cropper with some OpenCV magic to auto-straighten images and then allow free-form cropping that snaps to lines and features in the image, etc.
All of those have three things in common: they're dedicated to a very specific task or class of tasks that I happen to be doing, they each took less than an hour to create, and they exist specifically so I don't have to deal with whatever incidental bullshit that Photoshop or Word or Affinity or other Professional Tools For This Job throw at me.
(The label printer thing in particular was a pure frustration job.)
Pretty sure there's tons of such vibe-coded apps around - that do their jobs well, displace the classical general-purpose tools for their authors, but also they're too specialized to try and productionize/release.
EDIT: more recently, I even gave up on creating some of the apps in cases I normally would, after I noticed I can talk Claude on the mobile app into writing and running Python code, which turns out sufficient for many tasks involving data and image analysis.
LLMs are approaching the affordances that OpenSource claimed to offer but never did.
Non-coders are discovering the basics of - for example - Python scripting and running with it.
If this gets easy enough - questionable so far, but maybe one day - all code will be "Do this thing to this photo/document/music project."
The big toolbox products will become redundant.
Everyone is distacted by content generation, but if LLMs get good enough it will be possible to go back a step and give everyone a toolbox factory they can use to imagine and build whatever they want, with full control, instead of the current stab-around-until-you-find-something generative approach.
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.
And most importantly, you don't care at all if the tool you vibe-coded is any good. If you write at tool that converts an image to black & white, you are the kind of person who doesn't know or care what KIND of black&white it is. The fact that there are many algorithms to choose from would never cross your mind.
The same happens with whatever tool you vibe-code. You get the average of the worst quality open source versions that exist, combined with some randomness.
This is not "do one thing and do it well", this is "do one thing no matter how".
It's almost like people are finding out what scripting is because ai can do it for them.
This isn't new most businesses are run on scripts that process data. The only difference now is that more people can write them instead of paying for an app.
So the narrative here is wrong. Because vibe coding an app is overkill, in the same way that paying through the nose for a giant app that you only use one basic feature set of is.
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.
AI just frees us from always writing all the code ourselves. You still have to think at the architecture, and figure out what the product is and what features it should have.
Except in a small minority of circumstances "lowering the cost of code" doesnt really help if the code which was lowered in cost was crap code.
High quality code hasnt lowered in cost. Arguably it's gone up actually because more slop needs to be cleaned up.
And, for all people drone on about "customers/the business dont care about code quality they care about results" the indirect side effects of code quality are things they do care about deeply they just cant connect the dots.
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.
I think it is too early to answer that question. If I really wanted to, I could 'vibe code' Photoshop. But my estimate is that it would take me 2 years, as a solo dev. And by 'vibe code' I mean not write a single line by hand - I would still define and specify an outline for important data structures and algorithms. And then work through the system feature by feature, with many prompts needed for each feature, until it is perfect. It is much faster than coding by hand, but still a lot of work.
Currently, I am working on a smaller-than-Photoshop solo side-project that would have taken years, but now I am close to a beta after 6 months. If the main work is coding, I am easily 10x as productive. But those productivity gains don't hold up when teams are larger, because communication and processes are not really accelerated. So be a bit more patient. It's too early to expect vibecoded Photoshops.
Vibecoded Photoshop exists. That wine tracking app I referenced above is one of them. All it needs is an expert in the field who knows the constraint model.
It's the agent that codes. But it cannot determine what the software must never do, how it must fail gracefully, what it must feel like when state corruption occurs. This requires a person who has done the work and learned the workflow.
I've built a multi-tenant SaaS product complete with authentication, migration, internationalization, several integrations, with an agent in just six months. The difference between something that works in production and what turns out to be unmanageable is not in how many algorithms you use. It's in having enough knowledge of the domain to define the constraints for your agent. Sessions that have generated nonsense are those where the problem was not well understood by me to create such constraints.
The reason we don't have a vibecoded Photoshop is supply-related, not technical. Photoshop has been developed over 30 years and knows all about its edge cases. The person building its successor will be a professional who took the responsibility to develop her own tools.
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 tedious Photoshop work to scripts and routines of some kind. Likewise with text and data manipulation that I might have turned to software for before.
I don't have the slightest urge to incorporate this ad hoc collection of scripts into a central program, and I certainly don't intend to share them in any way, considering the growing hostility to sharing vibe-code.
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.
"If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now"
It is. Look at GitHub repos. Look at the r/selfhosting subreddit. Look at the r/macapps subreddit.
That doesn't mean people are "vibecoding Photoshop." Maybe LLMs will eventually be good enough that you can make a Photoshop without ever looking at any of the code, but they aren't right now.
"And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up."
> People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI.
Not really, the "people on here" rather consider that Anthropic and co. are profiting from you by making you think it's better to give them money to develop your app rather than do it yourself or hire a developer. The hype is there to steer you towards AI.
20 hours a week must be quite expensive in tokens.
I am working like 20 hours a week on my new iOS app with Codex.
People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI.
Is it so hard to believe that agentic coding now works? Engineers are taking it up left and right.
Edit with reply: I can't, because the app is still in the works. Also my HN account is again rate limited and I won't be able to post more comments.
Edit number two to the other comment:
It's not really that expensive. With Anthropic it would be $200, with Codex the $100 subscription is sufficient.
It is interesting phrasing when you say that the providers "are making me think" the use of their service would be better, rather than me reaching this conclusion myself after using their services extensively for my work.
And honestly, I think I've had it with HN. I can't even participate properly in the discussion, maybe because some moderator thought my comments and opinions unworthy again.
I recently had a coworker open my eyes to why vibe coding, or AI-assisted coding is so popular. He likened it to a slot machine, where pulling the slot's arm is like asking an LLM to code something. You get crap most of the time, but when it works, it's like getting a payout. That dopamine hit keeps them pulling, hoping for another hit, and they then believe it's a better way to develop software.
...and ultra high velocity single human person agent swarm vibe coded replacements for existing software and SaaS should come out en masse. Where are they?
You seem to be arguing that vibecoding photoshop wasn't possible up until 2 months ago, with GPT 5.4/5.5.
That's a very, very weird take on many, many levels. Could you elaborate a bit about where that view came from, how often you use AI, what's your career etc.?
Before Codex with GPT 5.4 and 5.5 I was working on a single feature only, no parallel conversations, and a ton of permission prompts would make it impossible for the agent to even work for five minutes on its own.
"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.
I'd say that the main challenge for vibe-cloning big and known programs comes down to cost. Plenty of extremely competent devs and companies out there are porting FOSS programs from one language to another, while offloading all the heavy lifting to the AI models - but even then, it can cost a non-trivial amount of money, and we're still talking about programs which are 1/10th in size of the ones you've mentioned.
I'm not sure exactly how many lines of code say Excel is, but if we estimate 10 MLOC of closed-source, then it would take a serious pile of cash for some SOTA LLM to reverse-engineer it. Especially given the fact that we don't have the code at hand to port.
Of course, we could use some open version of it, as best approximation, but there's still a ton of reverse engineering involved, which will burn tokens like crazy.
So the question becomes: What incentives are there for lone devs, or smaller teams, to vibe-clone some of the products, if it is going to cost them a fortune to do so? These things need funding.
Because a small fortune with AI is smalller than the massive fortune and a team it would have required before AI. You can trivially modulate your burn rate with AI, you can’t really slow down development once you have a team you need to pay.
If I’m understanding this correctly, it starts by raising this question, then argues that it’s kind of a cheap and meaningless punch-down.
I’m not sure I completely agree.. I think these types of questions are more a response to the level of hype around LLMs and less about knocking people down. You see a lot of people excited about the personal productivity app they vibe-coded (which IMO is totally legit - it’s cool that run-of-the-mill apps that used to require a professional developer are now available more on demand), and yet it’s hard to think of a new piece of high-impact traditional software that has come out since the release of ChatGPT.
But it’s also hard to think of the most recent piece of important traditional software that came out… at all. I couldn’t even name the most recent Photoshop-like release. Ableton / Fruityloops? Tableau? Big pro-sumer apps kind of plateaued in the early 00s.
LLMs have made it easier to develop software, but at the same time they’ve also raised the bar of what’s worth writing software to do. Many things that used to be apps are now just prompts. Maybe ChatGPT was the next Photoshop - it turned writing basic apps from a profession into a hobby.
Anyway. Good post - definitely not written by an LLM, and that’s a good thing.
Articles like this where the author argues all sides in some sort of steelmaning attempt and listing also sorts of arguments that they’re not making on behalf of some third party or whatever are so frustrating. Genuinely hard to tell what the author is trying to say in the maze of imagined third party accusers and listings of things they’re not saying
That's a bit like asking "Where are the vibecoded AWSs?" or "Where are the vibe coded Office 365s?"
Can I vibe code an image editor? Sure! I have, actually, just more as a curiosity. I got as far as a simple Canva replacement, and if that's what you need, maybe the question isn't can you vibe code Photoshop but rather can you vibe code Canva.
Photoshop is part of a gigantic ecosystem of tools, formats, and plugins that happens to have an image editor. More to the point, I've got an employee who has been using the Adobe ecosystem for decades, dating all the way back to the tools acquisition by Adobe. We have files that started as Pagemaker layouts in the 90s that are still in use. Could any given piece of new work be done in, say, GIMP? Of course! Does that get me out of my Adobe subscription for working with legacy files and having a Swiss Army knife for anything that might come along? Unfortunately, no.
I've been experimenting with a fairly vibecoded Office 365..., but rooted in the world of vibe (an advanced Markdown reader which can do complex things like render charts and mermaid diagrams, see: https://sdocs.dev, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=charts, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=diagrams). Slides coming soon too... But this is very much a subsection of the full Office suite.
I created Hosaka Studio using Claude Code. I wouldn't call it vibecoded however! I'm already a professional software dev and it was three months very hard work getting it to work properly across half a dozen different Linux distros, X11 and Wayland compositors (there's still a known issue on Nvidia+Cosmos).
So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
That's because testing is a layer above, and that requires effort from people, and people don't want to put in the effort or lack the skills to properly test with them. I think LLMs are superb at testing, but I have a lot of machinery in front of them to enable it
The only underlying rule that I see is: the more complex a task is, the lower the probability of success. That's it. And it's the same exact rule that applies to humans. The difference though is that we're seeing an exponential growth in AI capabilities, which are then rapidly disseminated on a scale of months, and we don't see such capability increases in humans.
As I see it, anyone whose mental model is built on what AI can or cannot do is going to have a very bumpy decade.
> There are levels in this work. Level 1 is the typing. Syntax, semicolons, the years memorizing pointer arithmetic and which header file the function lives in. Level 2 is the verifying. The harness. The test suite. The reflex of rejecting the ninety attempts that almost work and shipping the one that does. Level 3 is the deciding. What to build at all. Which architecture survives contact with the real world. (...)
> AI lowered the cost of Level 1. It did not touch Levels 2 or 3.
I feel like AI is firmly taking over Level 2 too. But more importantly, is that why no one vibecoded Photoshop? I think it's probably because it took >1 million man-hours to build it, so even at a 100x speedup it's not a very attractive project.
Agreed. Very firmly in level 2, and going well into level 3 too.
For example, I've had quite a few situations when I asked Claude Code to do some manual work for me, assuming it would do manual edits across several files, but it instead decided to write a script, and even a small test suite for it. It's a small encroachment so far, but I don't see any limitation for it gradually taking on actual product decisions.
What we desperately need is a (vibe-coded or otherwise) modern office suite. I maintain that this is the single biggest factor holding back widespread Linux adoption today, especially for businesses.
Huge swathes of the economy basically runs on Microsoft Office - internal and external business communication is via Powerpoint in meetings, internal and external documentation is via Word, internal analysis (big and small) is via Excel, collaboration is done reasonably well via Sharepoint, and they have the network effect that everyone else uses it too.
The reality is that the alternatives just don't stack up. Google's suite is great for collaboration and okay for limited work, but falls over completely when faced with large documents (imagine thousands of pages for a regulatory submissions) or spreadsheets with large amounts of data. Other options (Libre Offce, Softmaker Office, etc.) may excel in some domains, but offer a steep learning curve, and/or may be unreliable with Microsoft Office format compatibility, and/or are weak on the collaboration side.
Maybe not photoshop but I’m building in the live VFX (visual effects) space, for example think touch designer or Houdini (but simpler).
My first project was an “old school” node editor done almost entirely with agentic coding. I slapped an MCP on it to see if the agents could make cool stuff and it was mostly hit or miss, but nothing too mind blowing.
Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...
My second take on this is to channel coding agents into “prompt nodes” coupled with some agent orchestration. This helps define clear data flows and API contracts for each node + overall graph. This strategy works better since we’re constraining the problem space and overall getting better results when combined (and it also plays nice with context window limitations).
The current demo is a bit slow and basic but it’s looking promising!
https://sxp.studio/apps/subjectivezero
It could be said vibe coded competitors to any proprietary software. If everything proprietary was "forced open" by AI what would be the economic effects?
We've had OSS equivalents of almost everything for decades, you can install a mature Slack clone for $0 since 2015. Yet people don't because of laziness and brands are strong.
> Level 3 is the deciding. What to build at all [...] AI lowered the cost of Level 1. It did not touch Levels 2 or 3.
Actually where I get the most impressed working with AI is kind of at Level 3, where I ask for a feature and AI will suggest going further with it, or doing it in another, sometimes better, way.
Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
I’d like to share my thoughts as someone who uses Python and Claude Code on a daily basis (I’ve been running a research codebase and trading bot for several months).
I generally agree with the comment that “architecture is the bottleneck,” but based on my own experience, I’d like to elaborate further.
I don’t think the issue lies in code generation capabilities. The code generated by LLMs is competent on its own; the real bottleneck is cross-cutting consistency, which I believe is the primary challenge for applications on the scale of Photoshop.
For example, when I had Claude perform the task of “adding a new order type” to my trading bot:
-Implementation in the relevant file: 90% success on the first try
-Compatibility fixes on the backtesting engine side: 60% success with no oversights
-Cross-cutting concerns like logging, metrics, and notifications: 40% of these were missed
The missed parts pass both compilation and testing. I’ve experienced the most troublesome kind of failure: the code is broken in terms of specifications but cannot be detected mechanically.
Photoshop has an estimated tens of thousands of cross-cutting invariants. Every these tools must operate without conflict across all layer types, selection ranges, and color modes. However, reconciling all of this with a single LLM inference seems impossible with the current architecture.
In other words, the absence of a “vibecoded Photoshop” isn’t due to a superficial lack of capability in the LLM; rather, the current context window and attention mechanisms are structurally unsuited for maintaining global invariants. This may not be the kind of problem that can be solved simply by “scaling up.”
Conversely, the direction of “personalized bespoke small apps” pointed out by stevex has fewer cross-cutting invariants (since the functionality is localized) and aligns with areas where AI excels. My personal conclusion is that Photoshop and AI development are not competing; they are simply solving different problems.
Since these observations are based on Python-based projects, this cross-cutting failure pattern might be less pronounced in statically-checked languages like Java or Rust. I’d like to hear others’ observations on this.
>I feel sorry for everyone who is solely operating at Level 1 and with nothing left to contribute.
Nah, you don't. You're doing that junior developer humblebrag thing. You have to prove how good you are with the hot new thing. "Look at me, I'm better at something than the gray beards."
AI is just a tool, and a commercial one at that. You're proud of your ability to use a tool, congratulations. But you're letting it go to your head. "All those level 1s are left behind! Haha!" It's a tool. I remember being told if I didn't learn Microsoft Word there would be no jobs for me in the white collar workplace. If you won't buy Microsoft "go be a dumb tradie" or something was the implication. Sound familiar? It does to me.
And trust me, all your pride in using this tool will not be enough. There will still be someone who claims to hold level 4 or level 5. "Oh, you're just an AI user? Haha, I feel sorry for such a level 3 loser! I'm training models and tuning hyper parameters on level 50!" Because that's what insecure people do. They constantly feel a need to prove themselves, because they never reached a state of acknowledgement by their peers. They want to be one of the greats, but have never been recognized as such.
not some iteration of a markdown reader, that's easily copied of GitHub. or some useless React app - that doesn't interact with external data like most businesses do.
look around u - even the biggest companies can't ship software that works. n u expect an LLM to do so.
If Photoshop can be vibe coded in a couple of weeks, that's superintelligence.
I think of "tokens" as units of intelligence spent on a problem.
Producing software like Photoshop, Linux, or Excel literally cost billions of tokens (human intelligence back then, and now both human and artificial intelligence combined). A lot of deep intellectual problems were solved along the way, and the token cost of solving them accumulated. The true cost of Photoshop today should be measured in billions, maybe trillions of tokens.
AI can definitely generate some tokens, and it has accelerated everything involving intelligence. But it still can't produce 100 billion tokens worth of intelligence in a week. When that day comes, that's superintelligence. We'll go to Mars, we'll make fusion work. That's the singularity.
Just to be clear, I spent Billions of tokens last month, dick'ing around with AI, do I think it can do my job, sure if I was as checked out as I am feeling being mandated to only use AI for work...
Trust me this version of me can't write code better than an LLM. I think even the LLMs from 2 years ago could do as much.
Only thing we have solved with LLMs is how to generate code, as in literally converting what you type in as text into something somewhat working. Fixing the details is impossible for AI.
Same mistakes Indian IT Service firms already did, trusting third-party AI Service providers across every division and department in companies.
Now Open AI and Anthropic are launching own Service firm/wing for maximizing ROI. Direct Competition. Huge Loss for Indian IT Service Firms.
They paid AI providers to Train own automated competition end to end so much so that they are learnt the gaps and how-to own the market by corrections, private IP Source code access and embedded expertise extraction (stopping short of calling it literal corporate espionage, they got all the know-how and especially for modernizing legacy tech and integrations).
They are untrustworthy especially where IP is involved.
Indian and other IT Firms who did not use private self-hosted AI for important things nor monitored the usage and did not train their employees to think what ( or how much) of our institutional knowledge goes out to third-party are already facing trouble.
+ can you even define what is Photoshop? What capabilities does Photoshop have? Ignoring all the edge cases that it supports, what Photoshop allows you to do?
I expect a coding model being able to clone apps like Photoshop in the next two years.
But creating an app like that from scratch without a paragon (which is what Adobe did with Photoshop) is a lot harder.
No it's not. The point is that if building software is indeed way cheaper now, then someone should be able to guide AI to build Photoshop, Linux, or Excel while providing direction, but having the billions of tokens of human intelligence now provided by AI.
This sounds to me like saying: "if poverty has decreased, everyone should be able to buy a 40m yacht."
We can now simply buy an artificial form of intelligence to solve intellectual problems. That doesn't mean we can buy our way into solving every problem in a week.
Building Photoshop or Excel still has a huge intellectual cost. We can use AI to help us get there, but it won't be free, it's just getting marginally cheaper.
Made me recall that meme about the frequency of miracles over history, saying that it plummeted with the invention of the camera, regained its momentum with Photoshop, and now they added a twist saying that miracles skyrocketed with the popularization of AI
Who needs a Vibecoded photoshop when you can simply ask for the image that you need. And that is my fear for many other types of applications. We won't need an application at all.
Well, you'll still need an application to write a prompt in. And to send the prompt to an LLM. And to run an LLM. And hundreds of apps to manage the complexity of the data center.
And, well, to display the image I guess. Or maybe you'd want to print it, but the printer needs firmware, and firmware is an application itself.
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?
For Photoshop there are already "competitors", such as Canva or GIMP or countless others. But adoption has been limited.
Why ?
Because of the tightknit Adobe integration. If I create something in Photoshop, I can pull it in natively into any other programme in the Adobe suite ... e.g. InDesign (desktop publishing), Indesign (vector illutration), Premiere (non-linear video editing) or After Effects (motion graphics).
Not only can I pull it in natively, but in most cases I benefit from Adobe Dynamic Linking. Which means if I go back and mess with the Phtoshop file, it is automagically updated in all my child projects elsewhere.
Do not underestimate the sheer boost to the workflow and time savings that that provides !
Building on the above, if I'm recruiting designers, there is a very high chance they've spent the last 20 years using Photoshop. Am I going to waste my time and theirs forcing them to learn GIMP or whatever ? No. I will just get them an Adobe license.
Now let's hypothesize that my theoretical designer that I just employed has produced a product in InDesign that we're sending off to the printers....
If you want to get the best out of your printer during the pre-flight process, then you're absolutely want to be sending them a PDF file that came out of the Adobe toolset. Why ? Because your printer can send you Adobe-ready preflight-validation config files and because your printer can help you with issues. Not using Adobe ? Prepare for your printer to say "on your own chum".
Adobe is not perfect, but they command the market dominance they do for very good reason.
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.
I think one of the major reasons why it’s not here is because most AI tools are great for getting a prototype built up but undertaking a program like Photoshop which we can assume has a couple millions of lines of code is actually not easily replicable by vibe coding.
Can it be done? Probably. But the token cost to do so would be astronomically expensive. You still need a human (read prompt engineer) to steer the AI. Even small ideas I’ve thrown at it to test viability is often plagued by code that just simply doesn’t work. I am constantly having to send it back and say “this doesn’t work” and it will eventually figure it out but that is more wasted tokens just to get something that doesn’t throw an error during the build process.
One-off specialty programs are absolutely going to feel the heat. Take a multi-tone generation application (think Motorola pagers). You can now ask an AI to create that program for you, complete with tone generation and .wav recordings to use later.
Large programs are relatively safe for the moment just because of scale. But any small application that is usually behind some sort of paywall or license is absolutely going to be threatened since it’s no longer difficult to throw together a program in an evening and have 100% of the features you want and none of the features you didn’t need or want.
I didn’t follow the article’s thesis. It felt written from a defensive crouch and claimed not to be punching down but it seemed to be radiating hostility the entire time. Something about vibe coding only replaces the lowest level of mechanical work involved in creative pursuits (including coding)?
I’m not a booster a doomer or a boomer but I think it’s a reasonable litmus test for LLM coding to implement 80% of an existing app or service. It’s not an accusation against anyone using LLM (I do) nor is it an excuse to take shots, it’s just a way of framing SotA capabilities.
Didn't even gather a single vote, to be able to even show up in the show hn category (Like my 3 other AI projects shared here recently).
Have a look at the https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew category when logged in where new products first appear, it's just an ocean of flagged and show dead.
Agents (even fully local like in my case), exhibit fun behavior and are capable or designing their own fonts from scratch.
The difference between slop and non-slop, is just how long you run the agent loop, and how much you spend on quality control.
Then it's all about the economics game, on how much you should spend between marketing and artefact creation to have a money generating loop by pushing the slop through your users throat.
There is just so much content being produced, that it disperse the effort and potential customers, raising the barrier to reach this self-sustaining state required for growth and quality. In the end, existing players will just run the same agent loop from their dominant position and keep their advantage.
There are plenty of vibe-coded apps out there, I am sure. Mom and pop store fronts, "wellness trackers", todo managers - trivia of that sort.
LLMs make easy problems easier, but they do not make hard problems so.
For me, AI greatly reduces the TOIL - tooling, scripts, refactoring runs, and that's great. It does not, however, excuse you from knowing how to build solid, maintainable software past your little vibe sandbox.
This perhaps isn't an issue at any meaningful industry as I think there is little room in the space for a new OS to take off, but within hobbyist circles it seems it's becoming a problem. On subreddits such as r/osdev, a lot of interesting-looking projects are being called out for their code having a lot of AI hallmarks: commit history showing an entire OS with a shell and GUI being written in a week, almost exclusively very large, non-atomic commits, comments that randomly include words from a different language, and snippets of code that are blatantly plagiarised from well-known projects in the community.
It's such a strange thing to see, because it's an area of programming that has almost zero practical need these days. We already have three big desktop operating systems that cover 99% of use cases, and there are already projects that fill most other gaps. Unless you have a really specific problem that can't be solved by patching Linux, writing a whole new OS and everything that comes with it is unlikely to be worth the time. IMHO, the only reason to write an OS in current year is for the hell of it; if you're really interesting in programming and computers, you like solving problems, and you like building large, complex systems, writing an OS can be a really fun long-term project. If you do none of the work and simply leave an LLM to plan out the system and solve all the problems, you gain absolutely nothing from it.
We don't have vibecoded Photoshop, but... I have a vibecoded hexeditor. Vibecoded debugger. Vibecoded small document writer. Vibecoded file browser. Vibecoded virtualization runner on macOS. All for my personal usage and not released anywhere.
Why would I release it? Everyone can vibecode their own.
Second sentence form the article, "If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now." My answer: it is. Maybe we don't have a bunch of photo editing apps but it sure seems like we have a lot of vibe coded commercial and non-commercial projects being created. If i have to see one more vibe coded agent harness I might actually lose it. And I wouldn't call it all slop
the bottleneck is precise control. diffusion models are great at generation but bad at 'change only this region, preserve everything else exactly' — that constraint keeps Photoshop alive.
They mention Vibecoded compiler, here is one: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/full-optimizing-compiler-with-ai.... I continue to work on it in some limited spare time, but it continues well. I'm currently working on building an orchestrator to continue building it, as babysitting the AI still takes a lot of time. Need to figure out how to put the strategic direction into that though.
The biggest reason they don't exist is that you can buy them today. Why pay thousands of dollars and spend hundreds of hours to vibe code a photoshop when you can use the real, existing photoshop or one of its competitors immediately for a fraction of the price.
I think AI will do, like, 90% of them in 10 years.
With the last 10% takes much longer (15? 20?).
I am upset with the fact that we are accumulating code debit faster than ever.
In the most optimistic view, we could pay off those debit in around 10+ years (assume somebody care pay the money to buy token to clean up those).
That meant we need to suffer 10+ years of low quality code and software.
recently, I tried to make AI write Long Form Novel.
The first problem I see is, AI have no idea what is important.
Teaching them when and where to use active voice/passive voice, who needs to be the subject, when to change the focus is just impossible.
They love to add comparison and contrast on something least important. They love to use long list of adjective, which is unrelated to the context in current story chapter, just because those adjective are in my character file.
Understanding which problem is important in when and why is something hard.
I think same problem would appear in larger computer programs.
Aperture discontinued, one of the engineers in the team built a replacement, yet it's not Aperture.
Pixelmator did the "impossible", Apple bought them instead of doubling down on their talent and resources.
Small yet powerful editors like Acorn and Camera Bag Pro has no practical competitors in their spaces.
Technical problems are easy, yet humans and things involving human interaction is hard. You can't solve non-tangible problems by remixing tangible bits of code.
Heck, even Photoshop revamped a couple of dialog boxes, and a number of people got angry, because it behaves slightly differently and throws decades of muscle memory out of the window, and that costs people considerable amount of time.
Same question I ask, it’s free money, why isn’t a million people asking Claude to build it?
My guess is the lack of training data and understanding of the problems it solves, but AI was supposed to fix this already?
Happy I can use Claude for more trivial things, but if the AI labs wanted an actual benchmark, Photoshop or Davinci Resolve would be it.
The author of this post seems to have left something out. He never clearly states his thesis.
From what I can piece together he seems to think that agentic coded projects are being routinely dismissed as mere slop, and he feels that is wrong. But I’m not sure how that connects with the argument that if vibe coding were so great why haven’t we seen a duplicate of photoshop?
I can argue that vibe coding is bad even if someone produces something with it that seems good. Not saying I necessarily want to, but I could. Just because you have “90 test cases” that pass, or that you personally are happy with your own product is not proof of the success of vibe coding. (It is evidence, perhaps, but not proof… The evidence can be debated.)
The preliminary research have found a "downward pressure" in software quality, meaning AI assisted coding is already breaking things. I expect small firms to abandon updates altogether, re-writing the core parts of their code with prompts at every "update".
We normally don't talk about this much, it really degrades the quality of the discourse, but, all I can say is, sometimes these buttons are used under the influence of emotions, apparently.
People are not upset because "Level 1" was taken away from them.
For artists and creatives, _all levels_ have been taken away. And for most, their very basic needs (i.e. income) are being taken away.
And all that, just so we can get past "level 1"? Not even "level 4"? What kind of trade off is that??
We're supposed to be engineers. We spend days/weeks discussing how a table should be designed so it doesn't bite us in 6 months time. Yet here we are discarding almost _everything_ just to make "level 1" a little bit more convenient.
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.
I can argue that the music industry is decimated not directly by Napster, but their practices and dogmas set ground for it.
For me, even as a broke student "Free!" was not the charm, but "accessibility". I made music, played in orchestras. I know the effort required, and never wanted to steal livelihoods from people, but music before Napster was inaccessible.
Some free radios, expensive CDs and cheap cassettes with bad sound quality. It was impossible to explore and listen a broad spectrum of music.
Now I can try and buy albums. Yes, the publishers still earn way more than the musician, but it didn't start with Napster. It was still like that before Napster.
FWIW, I bought and still buy music rather than streaming it, I'd happily continue doing so. I just want DRM-Free high quality music to listen on various devices of mine, that's all.
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 engineering is a kind of creativity, too. Needs raw and real brain power, blood, sweat and tears to accomplish in a high quality manner.
This is what enshittification of everything looks like. Belittling any human being trying to build something genuine with their sincere effort. Instead, we accept the whiplash. "More code, faster!", "Minimize time to market!", "Milk the user as much as you can, we need the monies!", "Masters demand growth, demand monies!". For what? We shall receive a liveable life. Instead we accept when the demand is collectively rowing boats as slaves, lulling ourselves "at least we are alive".
Everything can be done in a better and dignified manner for all parties, but it doesn't generate money. The money you won't be able to spend, take to your next life, or afterlife for that manner.
yes, if I ever lose my job to an emerging technology, I will simply find another occupation instead of demanding the reality to bend to my will and that technology to be banned, outlawed, regulated out of existence. unlike the bohemian types, I do not consider myself to deserve some kind of affirmative action bullshit made just for me.
His argument is the equivalent of saying in ~1910 when the 1st mass produced Ford car came out "Where are the carbon brakes? Where is the hybrid motor system? Where is the ABS? Where are the rear parking cameras"?
The only people with higher expectations of the AI boom than the optimists are the pessimists. The forecasting I've seen [0] is that AI will be in a position to vibe-code things like Photoshop with some human assistance by around 2027-2030 if the current trends continue. Maybe fully autonomously in the mid 2030s depending on how many human-hours a basic clone of Photoshop takes to build.
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 findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data. No Excel required.
Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. 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.
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 to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.
Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.
Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.
Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.
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 fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional.
This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.
That still seems like a simple CRUD app.
even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.
He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.
Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.
I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.
After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.
Not exactly revolutionary in the way you’re claiming.
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.
My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror.
Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p...
That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
Would you rather press a button and go through a simple process that's normalized across all crud apps or talk to a chatbot every time you want to solve a problem and invoke external apis?
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 social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
> 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.
A lot of ai hype IS premised on ai being able to vibecode photoshop.
The difference is that normally, people would perhaps pay a company to buy a PS license, or pay a professional to edit their images, however now this market segment will just use VLMs to edit the image to what they need.
Some of those tools will use VLMs to provide more advanced features instead of implementing it themselves, making competing for a broader subset of users feasible.
2. Design professionals sell their work to businesses.
But if businesses start using AI image editing instead of contracting professionals, then Adobe won't have a market of Photoshop buyers.
Before you say that AI isn't good enough for the kind of business which pays for professional design, in one year it probably will be.
See this paragraph:
> There are no vibecoded Photoshops because vibecoding does not do what the rhetoric claims it does. The accusation itself is the vibe. The accuser feels that a thing must have been easy because it was made with AI. They post that feeling as if it were a finding. The finding never has to be checked, because nobody else checks it either. The accusation travels because it feels right, not because it is right. Big difference.
> The accusation that someone produced unverified output is itself being produced as unverified output
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.
e.g.
>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.
This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.
Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.
That's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.
I read the post, but I find it incoherent.
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.
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-preserving image cropper with some OpenCV magic to auto-straighten images and then allow free-form cropping that snaps to lines and features in the image, etc.
All of those have three things in common: they're dedicated to a very specific task or class of tasks that I happen to be doing, they each took less than an hour to create, and they exist specifically so I don't have to deal with whatever incidental bullshit that Photoshop or Word or Affinity or other Professional Tools For This Job throw at me.
(The label printer thing in particular was a pure frustration job.)
Pretty sure there's tons of such vibe-coded apps around - that do their jobs well, displace the classical general-purpose tools for their authors, but also they're too specialized to try and productionize/release.
EDIT: more recently, I even gave up on creating some of the apps in cases I normally would, after I noticed I can talk Claude on the mobile app into writing and running Python code, which turns out sufficient for many tasks involving data and image analysis.
LLMs are approaching the affordances that OpenSource claimed to offer but never did.
Non-coders are discovering the basics of - for example - Python scripting and running with it.
If this gets easy enough - questionable so far, but maybe one day - all code will be "Do this thing to this photo/document/music project."
The big toolbox products will become redundant.
Everyone is distacted by content generation, but if LLMs get good enough it will be possible to go back a step and give everyone a toolbox factory they can use to imagine and build whatever they want, with full control, instead of the current stab-around-until-you-find-something generative approach.
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.
The same happens with whatever tool you vibe-code. You get the average of the worst quality open source versions that exist, combined with some randomness.
This is not "do one thing and do it well", this is "do one thing no matter how".
And I don't have 10k -100k to blow on Nvidia cards nor to buy a few 100gb of RAM.
This isn't new most businesses are run on scripts that process data. The only difference now is that more people can write them instead of paying for an app.
So the narrative here is wrong. Because vibe coding an app is overkill, in the same way that paying through the nose for a giant app that you only use one basic feature set of is.
High quality code hasnt lowered in cost. Arguably it's gone up actually because more slop needs to be cleaned up.
And, for all people drone on about "customers/the business dont care about code quality they care about results" the indirect side effects of code quality are things they do care about deeply they just cant connect the dots.
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/
Currently, I am working on a smaller-than-Photoshop solo side-project that would have taken years, but now I am close to a beta after 6 months. If the main work is coding, I am easily 10x as productive. But those productivity gains don't hold up when teams are larger, because communication and processes are not really accelerated. So be a bit more patient. It's too early to expect vibecoded Photoshops.
It's the agent that codes. But it cannot determine what the software must never do, how it must fail gracefully, what it must feel like when state corruption occurs. This requires a person who has done the work and learned the workflow.
I've built a multi-tenant SaaS product complete with authentication, migration, internationalization, several integrations, with an agent in just six months. The difference between something that works in production and what turns out to be unmanageable is not in how many algorithms you use. It's in having enough knowledge of the domain to define the constraints for your agent. Sessions that have generated nonsense are those where the problem was not well understood by me to create such constraints.
The reason we don't have a vibecoded Photoshop is supply-related, not technical. Photoshop has been developed over 30 years and knows all about its edge cases. The person building its successor will be a professional who took the responsibility to develop her own tools.
> wine tracking app I referenced above is one of them. All it needs is an expert in the field who knows the constraint model.
Uh, where?
> The reason we don't have a vibecoded Photoshop
Clanker
Since I have had AI to knock up Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG, I have devolved a lot of tedious Photoshop work to scripts and routines of some kind. Likewise with text and data manipulation that I might have turned to software for before.
I don't have the slightest urge to incorporate this ad hoc collection of scripts into a central program, and I certainly don't intend to share them in any way, considering the growing hostility to sharing vibe-code.
So this particular iceberg may be 99% underwater.
It is. Look at GitHub repos. Look at the r/selfhosting subreddit. Look at the r/macapps subreddit.
That doesn't mean people are "vibecoding Photoshop." Maybe LLMs will eventually be good enough that you can make a Photoshop without ever looking at any of the code, but they aren't right now.
"And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up."
What accusation?
This article reads like an LLM wrote it.
So how long do we have to wait? The reality is the actual output doesn’t match the hype at all.
Software engineers should be getting laid off all over the place, there should be a decrease in hiring period. This is not what’s happening.
Not really, the "people on here" rather consider that Anthropic and co. are profiting from you by making you think it's better to give them money to develop your app rather than do it yourself or hire a developer. The hype is there to steer you towards AI.
20 hours a week must be quite expensive in tokens.
People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI.
Is it so hard to believe that agentic coding now works? Engineers are taking it up left and right.
Edit with reply: I can't, because the app is still in the works. Also my HN account is again rate limited and I won't be able to post more comments.
Edit number two to the other comment:
It's not really that expensive. With Anthropic it would be $200, with Codex the $100 subscription is sufficient.
It is interesting phrasing when you say that the providers "are making me think" the use of their service would be better, rather than me reaching this conclusion myself after using their services extensively for my work.
And honestly, I think I've had it with HN. I can't even participate properly in the discussion, maybe because some moderator thought my comments and opinions unworthy again.
GPT 5.4 came out at the start of March, GPT 5.5 end of April.
What do you expect, that we all go to market with a Photoshop competitor within two months?
Edit: and I can't provide any more replies since once again some automatic system or a mod rate limited my account for whatever reason.
That's a very, very weird take on many, many levels. Could you elaborate a bit about where that view came from, how often you use AI, what's your career etc.?
Before Codex with GPT 5.4 and 5.5 I was working on a single feature only, no parallel conversations, and a ton of permission prompts would make it impossible for the agent to even work for five minutes on its own.
Times have changed.
Talk about the numbers.
Cost reduction and revenue generation.
Anything else irrelevant - nobody cares. The world is about making money and moving things forward.
As I said, it's not exactly realistic to ask for numbers and a Photoshop competitor within two months.
"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.
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?
I'm not sure exactly how many lines of code say Excel is, but if we estimate 10 MLOC of closed-source, then it would take a serious pile of cash for some SOTA LLM to reverse-engineer it. Especially given the fact that we don't have the code at hand to port.
Of course, we could use some open version of it, as best approximation, but there's still a ton of reverse engineering involved, which will burn tokens like crazy.
So the question becomes: What incentives are there for lone devs, or smaller teams, to vibe-clone some of the products, if it is going to cost them a fortune to do so? These things need funding.
I’m not sure I completely agree.. I think these types of questions are more a response to the level of hype around LLMs and less about knocking people down. You see a lot of people excited about the personal productivity app they vibe-coded (which IMO is totally legit - it’s cool that run-of-the-mill apps that used to require a professional developer are now available more on demand), and yet it’s hard to think of a new piece of high-impact traditional software that has come out since the release of ChatGPT.
But it’s also hard to think of the most recent piece of important traditional software that came out… at all. I couldn’t even name the most recent Photoshop-like release. Ableton / Fruityloops? Tableau? Big pro-sumer apps kind of plateaued in the early 00s.
LLMs have made it easier to develop software, but at the same time they’ve also raised the bar of what’s worth writing software to do. Many things that used to be apps are now just prompts. Maybe ChatGPT was the next Photoshop - it turned writing basic apps from a profession into a hobby.
Anyway. Good post - definitely not written by an LLM, and that’s a good thing.
Are you serious?
Can I vibe code an image editor? Sure! I have, actually, just more as a curiosity. I got as far as a simple Canva replacement, and if that's what you need, maybe the question isn't can you vibe code Photoshop but rather can you vibe code Canva.
Photoshop is part of a gigantic ecosystem of tools, formats, and plugins that happens to have an image editor. More to the point, I've got an employee who has been using the Adobe ecosystem for decades, dating all the way back to the tools acquisition by Adobe. We have files that started as Pagemaker layouts in the 90s that are still in use. Could any given piece of new work be done in, say, GIMP? Of course! Does that get me out of my Adobe subscription for working with legacy files and having a Swiss Army knife for anything that might come along? Unfortunately, no.
It’s written mostly in very readable Pascal with some 68000 assembly.
For those not familiar (or not old as me), Pascal was popular in 80s. The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like.
LLMs are good at converting programming languages; it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to convert it to Swift, Rust, etc.
[1]: https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...
(Also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633)
So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
The LLMs suck at testing still, so the feedback cycle still requires human input
Same way as LLMs cannot code anything complex, they cannot test complex scenarios.
The only underlying rule that I see is: the more complex a task is, the lower the probability of success. That's it. And it's the same exact rule that applies to humans. The difference though is that we're seeing an exponential growth in AI capabilities, which are then rapidly disseminated on a scale of months, and we don't see such capability increases in humans.
As I see it, anyone whose mental model is built on what AI can or cannot do is going to have a very bumpy decade.
> AI lowered the cost of Level 1. It did not touch Levels 2 or 3.
I feel like AI is firmly taking over Level 2 too. But more importantly, is that why no one vibecoded Photoshop? I think it's probably because it took >1 million man-hours to build it, so even at a 100x speedup it's not a very attractive project.
For example, I've had quite a few situations when I asked Claude Code to do some manual work for me, assuming it would do manual edits across several files, but it instead decided to write a script, and even a small test suite for it. It's a small encroachment so far, but I don't see any limitation for it gradually taking on actual product decisions.
Huge swathes of the economy basically runs on Microsoft Office - internal and external business communication is via Powerpoint in meetings, internal and external documentation is via Word, internal analysis (big and small) is via Excel, collaboration is done reasonably well via Sharepoint, and they have the network effect that everyone else uses it too.
The reality is that the alternatives just don't stack up. Google's suite is great for collaboration and okay for limited work, but falls over completely when faced with large documents (imagine thousands of pages for a regulatory submissions) or spreadsheets with large amounts of data. Other options (Libre Offce, Softmaker Office, etc.) may excel in some domains, but offer a steep learning curve, and/or may be unreliable with Microsoft Office format compatibility, and/or are weak on the collaboration side.
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Performance art.
My first project was an “old school” node editor done almost entirely with agentic coding. I slapped an MCP on it to see if the agents could make cool stuff and it was mostly hit or miss, but nothing too mind blowing. Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...
My second take on this is to channel coding agents into “prompt nodes” coupled with some agent orchestration. This helps define clear data flows and API contracts for each node + overall graph. This strategy works better since we’re constraining the problem space and overall getting better results when combined (and it also plays nice with context window limitations). The current demo is a bit slow and basic but it’s looking promising! https://sxp.studio/apps/subjectivezero
Same goes for slack.
Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
I generally agree with the comment that “architecture is the bottleneck,” but based on my own experience, I’d like to elaborate further.
I don’t think the issue lies in code generation capabilities. The code generated by LLMs is competent on its own; the real bottleneck is cross-cutting consistency, which I believe is the primary challenge for applications on the scale of Photoshop.
For example, when I had Claude perform the task of “adding a new order type” to my trading bot: -Implementation in the relevant file: 90% success on the first try -Compatibility fixes on the backtesting engine side: 60% success with no oversights -Cross-cutting concerns like logging, metrics, and notifications: 40% of these were missed
The missed parts pass both compilation and testing. I’ve experienced the most troublesome kind of failure: the code is broken in terms of specifications but cannot be detected mechanically.
Photoshop has an estimated tens of thousands of cross-cutting invariants. Every these tools must operate without conflict across all layer types, selection ranges, and color modes. However, reconciling all of this with a single LLM inference seems impossible with the current architecture.
In other words, the absence of a “vibecoded Photoshop” isn’t due to a superficial lack of capability in the LLM; rather, the current context window and attention mechanisms are structurally unsuited for maintaining global invariants. This may not be the kind of problem that can be solved simply by “scaling up.”
Conversely, the direction of “personalized bespoke small apps” pointed out by stevex has fewer cross-cutting invariants (since the functionality is localized) and aligns with areas where AI excels. My personal conclusion is that Photoshop and AI development are not competing; they are simply solving different problems.
Since these observations are based on Python-based projects, this cross-cutting failure pattern might be less pronounced in statically-checked languages like Java or Rust. I’d like to hear others’ observations on this.
Nah, you don't. You're doing that junior developer humblebrag thing. You have to prove how good you are with the hot new thing. "Look at me, I'm better at something than the gray beards."
AI is just a tool, and a commercial one at that. You're proud of your ability to use a tool, congratulations. But you're letting it go to your head. "All those level 1s are left behind! Haha!" It's a tool. I remember being told if I didn't learn Microsoft Word there would be no jobs for me in the white collar workplace. If you won't buy Microsoft "go be a dumb tradie" or something was the implication. Sound familiar? It does to me.
And trust me, all your pride in using this tool will not be enough. There will still be someone who claims to hold level 4 or level 5. "Oh, you're just an AI user? Haha, I feel sorry for such a level 3 loser! I'm training models and tuning hyper parameters on level 50!" Because that's what insecure people do. They constantly feel a need to prove themselves, because they never reached a state of acknowledgement by their peers. They want to be one of the greats, but have never been recognized as such.
not some iteration of a markdown reader, that's easily copied of GitHub. or some useless React app - that doesn't interact with external data like most businesses do.
look around u - even the biggest companies can't ship software that works. n u expect an LLM to do so.
leave the LLM to be a better search.
I think of "tokens" as units of intelligence spent on a problem.
Producing software like Photoshop, Linux, or Excel literally cost billions of tokens (human intelligence back then, and now both human and artificial intelligence combined). A lot of deep intellectual problems were solved along the way, and the token cost of solving them accumulated. The true cost of Photoshop today should be measured in billions, maybe trillions of tokens.
AI can definitely generate some tokens, and it has accelerated everything involving intelligence. But it still can't produce 100 billion tokens worth of intelligence in a week. When that day comes, that's superintelligence. We'll go to Mars, we'll make fusion work. That's the singularity.
Trust me this version of me can't write code better than an LLM. I think even the LLMs from 2 years ago could do as much.
Only thing we have solved with LLMs is how to generate code, as in literally converting what you type in as text into something somewhat working. Fixing the details is impossible for AI.
Today and beyond.
Now Open AI and Anthropic are launching own Service firm/wing for maximizing ROI. Direct Competition. Huge Loss for Indian IT Service Firms.
They paid AI providers to Train own automated competition end to end so much so that they are learnt the gaps and how-to own the market by corrections, private IP Source code access and embedded expertise extraction (stopping short of calling it literal corporate espionage, they got all the know-how and especially for modernizing legacy tech and integrations).
They are untrustworthy especially where IP is involved.
Indian and other IT Firms who did not use private self-hosted AI for important things nor monitored the usage and did not train their employees to think what ( or how much) of our institutional knowledge goes out to third-party are already facing trouble.
A proxy for it would be we see a huge wave of lay offs.
This is not happening.
We can now simply buy an artificial form of intelligence to solve intellectual problems. That doesn't mean we can buy our way into solving every problem in a week.
Building Photoshop or Excel still has a huge intellectual cost. We can use AI to help us get there, but it won't be free, it's just getting marginally cheaper.
And, well, to display the image I guess. Or maybe you'd want to print it, but the printer needs firmware, and firmware is an application itself.
For Photoshop there are already "competitors", such as Canva or GIMP or countless others. But adoption has been limited.
Why ?
Because of the tightknit Adobe integration. If I create something in Photoshop, I can pull it in natively into any other programme in the Adobe suite ... e.g. InDesign (desktop publishing), Indesign (vector illutration), Premiere (non-linear video editing) or After Effects (motion graphics).
Not only can I pull it in natively, but in most cases I benefit from Adobe Dynamic Linking. Which means if I go back and mess with the Phtoshop file, it is automagically updated in all my child projects elsewhere.
Do not underestimate the sheer boost to the workflow and time savings that that provides !
Building on the above, if I'm recruiting designers, there is a very high chance they've spent the last 20 years using Photoshop. Am I going to waste my time and theirs forcing them to learn GIMP or whatever ? No. I will just get them an Adobe license.
Now let's hypothesize that my theoretical designer that I just employed has produced a product in InDesign that we're sending off to the printers....
If you want to get the best out of your printer during the pre-flight process, then you're absolutely want to be sending them a PDF file that came out of the Adobe toolset. Why ? Because your printer can send you Adobe-ready preflight-validation config files and because your printer can help you with issues. Not using Adobe ? Prepare for your printer to say "on your own chum".
Adobe is not perfect, but they command the market dominance they do for very good reason.
Everybody (not actually everybody) has wanted one for 20+ years, and almost nobody made it.
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.
What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?
Can it be done? Probably. But the token cost to do so would be astronomically expensive. You still need a human (read prompt engineer) to steer the AI. Even small ideas I’ve thrown at it to test viability is often plagued by code that just simply doesn’t work. I am constantly having to send it back and say “this doesn’t work” and it will eventually figure it out but that is more wasted tokens just to get something that doesn’t throw an error during the build process.
One-off specialty programs are absolutely going to feel the heat. Take a multi-tone generation application (think Motorola pagers). You can now ask an AI to create that program for you, complete with tone generation and .wav recordings to use later.
Large programs are relatively safe for the moment just because of scale. But any small application that is usually behind some sort of paywall or license is absolutely going to be threatened since it’s no longer difficult to throw together a program in an evening and have 100% of the features you want and none of the features you didn’t need or want.
I’m not a booster a doomer or a boomer but I think it’s a reasonable litmus test for LLM coding to implement 80% of an existing app or service. It’s not an accusation against anyone using LLM (I do) nor is it an excuse to take shots, it’s just a way of framing SotA capabilities.
Weird article, perhaps I missed something.
Didn't even gather a single vote, to be able to even show up in the show hn category (Like my 3 other AI projects shared here recently).
Have a look at the https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew category when logged in where new products first appear, it's just an ocean of flagged and show dead.
Agents (even fully local like in my case), exhibit fun behavior and are capable or designing their own fonts from scratch.
The difference between slop and non-slop, is just how long you run the agent loop, and how much you spend on quality control.
Then it's all about the economics game, on how much you should spend between marketing and artefact creation to have a money generating loop by pushing the slop through your users throat.
There is just so much content being produced, that it disperse the effort and potential customers, raising the barrier to reach this self-sustaining state required for growth and quality. In the end, existing players will just run the same agent loop from their dominant position and keep their advantage.
Why is this the measure of success?
LLMs make easy problems easier, but they do not make hard problems so.
For me, AI greatly reduces the TOIL - tooling, scripts, refactoring runs, and that's great. It does not, however, excuse you from knowing how to build solid, maintainable software past your little vibe sandbox.
This perhaps isn't an issue at any meaningful industry as I think there is little room in the space for a new OS to take off, but within hobbyist circles it seems it's becoming a problem. On subreddits such as r/osdev, a lot of interesting-looking projects are being called out for their code having a lot of AI hallmarks: commit history showing an entire OS with a shell and GUI being written in a week, almost exclusively very large, non-atomic commits, comments that randomly include words from a different language, and snippets of code that are blatantly plagiarised from well-known projects in the community.
It's such a strange thing to see, because it's an area of programming that has almost zero practical need these days. We already have three big desktop operating systems that cover 99% of use cases, and there are already projects that fill most other gaps. Unless you have a really specific problem that can't be solved by patching Linux, writing a whole new OS and everything that comes with it is unlikely to be worth the time. IMHO, the only reason to write an OS in current year is for the hell of it; if you're really interesting in programming and computers, you like solving problems, and you like building large, complex systems, writing an OS can be a really fun long-term project. If you do none of the work and simply leave an LLM to plan out the system and solve all the problems, you gain absolutely nothing from it.
If we wanted to replace any of these operating systems in 10 years, or needed to, the best time to start would be now.
Why would I release it? Everyone can vibecode their own.
- Don’t bring a forklift to your gym
- LLMs are more like 3D printers than fully automated factories / dark factories.
Curious what other analogies have found staying power.
The fact you started the text with is true: there aren't vibecoded complex apps, because vibecoding doesn't work.
The rest of the text is an incoherent rambling that looks like two people arguing and doesn't make any sense.
You should probably stop using gen AI and seek therapy.
Sending patches to an existing kernel is joining the dots, but do your own!
I am upset with the fact that we are accumulating code debit faster than ever. In the most optimistic view, we could pay off those debit in around 10+ years (assume somebody care pay the money to buy token to clean up those).
That meant we need to suffer 10+ years of low quality code and software.
recently, I tried to make AI write Long Form Novel.
The first problem I see is, AI have no idea what is important.
Teaching them when and where to use active voice/passive voice, who needs to be the subject, when to change the focus is just impossible. They love to add comparison and contrast on something least important. They love to use long list of adjective, which is unrelated to the context in current story chapter, just because those adjective are in my character file.
Understanding which problem is important in when and why is something hard.
I think same problem would appear in larger computer programs.
Aperture discontinued, one of the engineers in the team built a replacement, yet it's not Aperture.
Pixelmator did the "impossible", Apple bought them instead of doubling down on their talent and resources.
Small yet powerful editors like Acorn and Camera Bag Pro has no practical competitors in their spaces.
Technical problems are easy, yet humans and things involving human interaction is hard. You can't solve non-tangible problems by remixing tangible bits of code.
Heck, even Photoshop revamped a couple of dialog boxes, and a number of people got angry, because it behaves slightly differently and throws decades of muscle memory out of the window, and that costs people considerable amount of time.
Happy I can use Claude for more trivial things, but if the AI labs wanted an actual benchmark, Photoshop or Davinci Resolve would be it.
From what I can piece together he seems to think that agentic coded projects are being routinely dismissed as mere slop, and he feels that is wrong. But I’m not sure how that connects with the argument that if vibe coding were so great why haven’t we seen a duplicate of photoshop?
I can argue that vibe coding is bad even if someone produces something with it that seems good. Not saying I necessarily want to, but I could. Just because you have “90 test cases” that pass, or that you personally are happy with your own product is not proof of the success of vibe coding. (It is evidence, perhaps, but not proof… The evidence can be debated.)
For artists and creatives, _all levels_ have been taken away. And for most, their very basic needs (i.e. income) are being taken away.
And all that, just so we can get past "level 1"? Not even "level 4"? What kind of trade off is that??
We're supposed to be engineers. We spend days/weeks discussing how a table should be designed so it doesn't bite us in 6 months time. Yet here we are discarding almost _everything_ just to make "level 1" a little bit more convenient.
It's pathetic.
Go suffer until something good happens in your fingers.
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.
For me, even as a broke student "Free!" was not the charm, but "accessibility". I made music, played in orchestras. I know the effort required, and never wanted to steal livelihoods from people, but music before Napster was inaccessible.
Some free radios, expensive CDs and cheap cassettes with bad sound quality. It was impossible to explore and listen a broad spectrum of music.
Now I can try and buy albums. Yes, the publishers still earn way more than the musician, but it didn't start with Napster. It was still like that before Napster.
FWIW, I bought and still buy music rather than streaming it, I'd happily continue doing so. I just want DRM-Free high quality music to listen on various devices of mine, that's all.
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 engineering is a kind of creativity, too. Needs raw and real brain power, blood, sweat and tears to accomplish in a high quality manner.
This is what enshittification of everything looks like. Belittling any human being trying to build something genuine with their sincere effort. Instead, we accept the whiplash. "More code, faster!", "Minimize time to market!", "Milk the user as much as you can, we need the monies!", "Masters demand growth, demand monies!". For what? We shall receive a liveable life. Instead we accept when the demand is collectively rowing boats as slaves, lulling ourselves "at least we are alive".
Everything can be done in a better and dignified manner for all parties, but it doesn't generate money. The money you won't be able to spend, take to your next life, or afterlife for that manner.
But more power to you and your welder.
Moving the goalpost.
That might be a letdown for some.
[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... does nice charts