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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

So this particular iceberg may be 99% underwater.

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.

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.

Weird article, perhaps I missed something.

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.

I think it was in these forums where I first read that you can gauge AI progress by the velocity at which people move the goalposts.

"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."

What accusation?

This article reads like an LLM wrote it.

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.

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.

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.

One of the bottlenecks right now is testing.

The LLMs suck at testing still, so the feedback cycle still requires human input

> 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.

why would anyone vibecode photoshop when AI already makes images

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Performance art.

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.

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

Photoshop?! Where we’re going, we don’t need photoshop.

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?

  > 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.

Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.

Same answer as to the question "Where are all the better versions of Photoshop?" before LLMs were a thing.

Everybody (not actually everybody) has wanted one for 20+ years, and almost nobody made it.

where r the vibe coded "useful" apps.

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.

> the vibecoded OS

What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?

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.

There will never be a vibecoded Photoshop.

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.

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

See http//localhost:3000

I think they have a point. But the "QED" at the end leaves a cringe aftertaste

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.

lol Stuart Semple has been trying to build one he kickstartered for like 2 years. i think the last status update said he got the lasso working

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.

AI is not yet at the superhuman stage where you can tell it "clone Photoshop" and get a perfect result within a day for almost free

https://archive.is/kO6Ph

Waiting for people vibe coding their own kernel, go on.

Sending patches to an existing kernel is joining the dots, but do your own!

Wtf did I just read?

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.

The vibecoded OS builder (by yours truly) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167846

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 should there be?

Why is this the measure of success?

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.

>Where is... the vibecoded OS

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.

Feels like AI skipped directly to coding and forgot the creative people who’ve been suffering with Photoshop layers for years

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.

The Canva's "new" Affinity?

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.

FYI Looks like the site is down, the link is returning a 503 Service Unavailable. Probably victim of its own success.

GIZMO! HI!!! Long time no see :D Hope you are doing good!

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 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.

can all of you say that competitor to photoshop made by AI native teams is impossible in 10 years?

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.

that's why I am doubling down on software stock.

we're all just gonna skim over the fact that this blog is blatantly written by AI? is HN cool with that now

Next twelve months will be interesting in software quality.

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.

It's pathetic.

If the crap worked, they would not acquihire coder teams.

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"?

Moving the goalpost.

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.

That might be a letdown for some.

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... does nice charts