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.

▲

ben_w an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed. But:

> 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.

	▲	hilariously 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲

le-mark an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.

A lot of ai hype IS premised on ai being able to vibecode photoshop.