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.

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

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.

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 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.

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/

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.

> 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.

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'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.

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.

So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.

  > 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.

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

A lot of things that were previously accomplished with Photoshop + training + practices are now done directly in one prompt (e.g. https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation/)

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

But it's more like, still open to debate but sounds likely: how long until vibe coding is powerful enough to generate Photoshop alternatives quickly?

So yeah I think people would concede the point that vibe coding isn't quite all there yet; but is it there at the size of a function or module or collection of small pieces of code? Definitely.

The other part of the conversation is about how AI-assisted coders may be doing other things than creating a Photoshop alternative. Maybe many of us don't need Photoshop and use something like Gimp instead. Maybe people feel existing software like Photoshop or its alternatives are "sufficient enough" so they're building something else instead. Maybe the people who use Photoshop lack incentives or skills to vibe code an app themselves, and maybe the people who don't use it aren't interested in creating a Photoshop alternative.

Maybe there are other bottlenecks than just code generation that are holding back more alternatives being created: where to post code after you create it, when there is more "noise" online; of getting ideas for things to create in general, which might be a problem independent of AI; of other economic and social conditions that have people focused on solving other problems currently rather than creating a Photoshop alternative.

So I think the point stands that we don't have the expected Photoshop alternatives currently, but I think we will probably see more of that in time, and we might also see AI be used in other ways than may be expected (another comment for example suggested maybe people might skip Photoshop altogether and just use AI to generate photos or effects; I can appreciate the idea that this doesn't replace how a lot of people use Photoshop, but on the other hand I can also think of some instances where it might for some people).

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Performance art.

That said, it's been a whole lot of fun to build, and the real wins are in the tangents it lets me go off on. I spent a whole day building a "badge lab" and just adding random features and sliders. I had a sunset motif in the background of a garden planner I was sketching out, and it led to this, which took a day or two: https://orochi235.github.io/experiments/interstellar-horizon....

I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.

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.

If you are a person using Photoshop and you're vibecoding you're better off just vibecoding what you need to streamline workflows, reduce human mistakes, have better integration with other business concerns, better ai integration, etc. since it has less features, you're not going to be able to/want to competitively offer it on the marketplace, so it won't have much visibility, if any.

Photoshop is a (formerly?) great toolbox. Toolboxes are good if you need to cater to a wide audience. An audience of one via bespoke software - the real revolution - doesn't need the full photoshop experience.

Countless examples previously requiring photoshop are now replaced with some ffmpeg and imagemagick pipelines written by AI daily.

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 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.

The author seems unwell

So that it would be easily to add functionalities with plugins - for file reading, oganization, edit, and everything.

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.

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.

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.

The result is always the same: a beautiful UI, everything feels smooth and responsive, but the core logic doesn’t actually work.

I think this is exactly what the author is talking about.

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.

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.

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.

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

being able to build the stack and create bespoke solutions with llms's is incredible..

idk why people get mad about vibe-coding. if ur little brother can make a Spotify clone with Claude in a day, shouldn't that mean that you as a dev should be able to create something 100x better that makes Spotify obsolete?

good ideas / feasible novel architecture design will be the only thing valuable..

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.

Why is this the measure of success?

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.

"Where are the vibecoded X app replacements?" questions aren't asking that question, they are making the argument that the author is. Software is immensely complicated and "vibecoding" is not going to build products.

You could reword the original question as: "If LLM coding is so fantastic and game changing, why are major products which are hugely profitable not battling with other companies which are producing competitors? Why would OpenAI/Anthropic sell the LLM access itself, instead of hoarding all the compute they can and become mega conglomerates in a takeover of all software?"

The author argues that software is way more complex than some prompt can describe, and that's what the original question also states. Level 1/2/3 BS nothing - coding was never and will never be the hard part.

I don't particularly like phrasing the argument I described as "where are the vibecoded X?" but instead as "Why are there so many issues still with major products? Why does Windows still have so many issues? Why is performance still absolutely shit on nearly every application?" The answers to these are not solved by more code, but by actual engineering, which LLMs don't provide. But the LLM dealers will try their best to convince you that they do provide on this level.

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.

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.

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 you want to put it in such dumb terms: AlphaFold.

However, Photoshop and Excel aren't only code. They're a culture, a social environment. They are the user base that built a social environment that nurtures these products and makes them culturally relevant. This social environment can't be build in 2 years.

An example:

I do game dev as a hobby, and target the browser as the platform.

Before I would shim general purpose tools into the development lifecycle because I was more interested in building games not tools. Now, I'm accumulating tiny single purpose tools that fit my usecases much more closely.

Where before it would be super expensive and probably inappropriate to create tightly coupled tools to a single data model / usecSe now it's super cheap, just part of the sdlc.

The end result for me is a much more ergonomic and taylor fit experience that helps me achieve my end goal. Am I going to release these tools? Absolutely not. It wouldn't make sense for anyone outside of potsandpans' gamedev loop.

So, I think this accusation is a bit "old world" thinking. I don't expect to see a million photo shops. There's already general purpose photo editing software: photoshop and gimp. I _might_ expect to see savvy devs and artists using photoshop less and using custom tools more. We might not even see or hear about that, other than when photoshop sales drop.

“If AI is so great why hasn’t it reproduced (some incredible cathedral of software built over 40 years of intensive hand crafting).”

Don’t feed the trolls folks - nothing you say in reply can convince the poser of the question because it’s a trap not a question, designed to validate the askers worldview that AI is somehow fake.

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.

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.

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

Moving the goalpost.

(The domain, FWIW, is a geospatial transport-planning tool, including a completely custom microsimulation engine, with loads of options for visualization, analytics, etc.)

At the start of this development process, LLMs were capable of assisting with little more than the framework boilerplate stuff. That was very useful, but was well under 50% of the LOC. They were particularly bad at understanding the microsimulator, where they would routinely forget which end of a FIFO queue was the front. LLMs are routinely and correctly criticized for their lack of a true world model, and when it came to modelling real-world physical/spatial/geographic systems, the fact that they see the world as nothing but text was a huge limitation. Not just in terms of having a pretty hazy grasp on concepts like "spatial direction", but even more critically, being unable to rationalize about the "world-within-a-world" which the simulator is attempting to model. They were fully unable to do that.

That was 18 months ago. Now, Claude writes > 99% of my code. It demonstrates a far better grasp of first-order world-model phenomena (like "spatial orientation"), and a decent (but not fantastic) ability to reason about the second-order "world-within-a-world" that the simulator is creating. It's a huge improvement. For some areas of the code, I still need to spell things out very explicitly, giving precise instructions for how a method will work. That's definitely not vibe-coding. But for other areas of the code, I can just say "add this analysis or visualization feature", without specifying how, and Claude will one-shot a result that's somewhere between good and great.

So where we're at now is that Claude often needs hand-holding for some of the most complex areas of the code, and it definitely doesn't understand how the whole application hangs together -- I have to keep reminding it of that, and am constantly taking steps to ensure that it remains well-architected doesn't devolve into a collection of warring patches.

And yet -- in the past 18 months, the boundary between what the LLM is capable of and what I need to exercise control over has shifted MASSIVELY, and it has shifted in the direction of LLMs being more able to rationalize about meta-models and higher-order architectures.

I've got two small children. When they say they can't do something, I always remind them that they can't do that thing -- YET. What they can do today is very far from the ultimate limits of their capabilities. I feel similarly about the capabilities of LLMs. No, they definitely can't vibecode a Photoshop-class application. YET.

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.)

That might be a letdown for some.

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