Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones
Over the last several months I have been tracking AI guys trying to create vibe coded clones of popular apps, especially Adobe’s apps which have always been the most pirated apps since the 90s.
There are now about a dozen vibe coded attempts to clone Photoshop and some other Adobe apps, not including dozens of forks of them.
The amount being spent in AI tokens (API costs) is in the thousands of dollars per project.
The largest attempt to vibe clone Adobe’s apps has over 70 devs using Claude to submit 100s of pull requests per day. The amount they are spending on tokens must be over $50,000 in the last two weeks. I will not name this project and don’t want to give them traffic that they do not deserve.
Yet despite this not one of these vibe coded projects has been able to create a brush engine that matches Photoshop’s brush engine. The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera.
Brush performance aside, each of these projects struggle with 100% file format compatibility and lossless images editing. So instead of innovating and pushing forward they have successfully rewinded the clock back to 1996 when there was a lack of industry standardisation and quality.
They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.
They rant and claim the era of subscription software is finished, but they are subscribed to AI services and AI software. The amount they are paying to AI companies is far higher than the cost of Adobe, Autodesk, Canva or Maxxon applications, and the result is barely usable vibe coded apps that will need to be continually maintained at high cost.
Whether software is vibe coded or not, open source software has rarely challenged commercial software. Krita has been around for years and is a decent application, but Clip Studio Paint’s subscriptions earn Celsys millions of dollars a year. Nobody is giving up Clip Studio Paint for software that has rough edges. Blender is a fantastic application, but Cinema 4D and Maya are still the 3D animation application of choice for larger studios and commercial productions. They lead, Blender tries to follow.
And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
The saddest part in all this is how it feeds into the ignorance and online hate campaign against Adobe that we have seen in the last 5 or so years. Some have labelled it ‘Adobe derangement syndrome’, but whatever it is it is a mix of stock market manipulation (some admit it) and anger that Photoshop has been getting harder to pirate ever since cloud services were integrated into Adobe’s application suite. We should clear the air here.
Subscription software exists when cloud services and cloud compute are integrated into a software suite. It is the only way to pay for the running costs at wide scale. If you remove these modern services there is limited progress in software development. You'll have to move all high cost compute locally which is impractical because most users cannot afford a high end workstation GPU or cloud server.
Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger.
If they have an issue with companies being large, they now have the tools to compete against them. But instead of vibe cloning poor quality rip offs why not build new original creative applications around fresh ideas that have never been tried before?