I think people aren't thinking enough about the second-order effects of this.
The immediate reaction is to ask whether any of these would be good enough to replace Photoshop (or Pixelmator or whatever). That's a first-order question and it's an open one --- you probably couldn't replace a real workflow with vibe Photoshop today, but I wouldn't bet against that being the case a year from now.
But the second-order questions include consideration of the people who can't use Photoshop, either because of cost or (to me, more importantly) because of lack of platform support.
In a world where 90% of the functionality of things like Photoshop and Word are replaceable with personal apps, how much does platform support matter anymore? How much do platforms matter anymore? I'm a committed macOS user and have been since the TiBook. Will I be 5 years from now? I'm deeply uncertain, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that if I'm not a macOS user, I also won't be a Windows or Linux user.
But OpenAI does. If the models can vibe code software and operating systems and design 3D printed objects, what's stopping advances in material science to improve battery technology and beat Apple at their own game?
OpenAI Planning A 2028 Smartphone With Custom Chips
The battery in particular is not battery technology. It's equal parts the CPU hardware (though intel and amd are making good strides) and software. Back in the windows bootcamp days, you would get substantially better battery life from macOS than from windows on the same hardware.
Then there's things like properly sleep and suspend support.
I predicted something a few years ago that I still believe will come true: in time, you won't search YouTube for an existing, pre-recorded video that solves your itch, instead you'll describe a problem and a video will be generated in real-time, on the spot that meets your needs. This video will (legally, with consent) use the faces and voices of "YouTubers" (humans who have signed up their personality) to communicate with you. If you don't have subscriptions or the system wants to show you new "creators", then it'll still do what it does today plus generate new personalities that fit your profile - gay/heterosexual, male/female, 20-25 years old, etc.
The same applies to software: you'll describe a problem and a network of agents will write a solution faster than you can Google it, download it, install it, and start using it. It'll work with your accessibility requirements out of the box; it's UI will be in your language; the data will be stored where ever you like; and so on.
I have thought about something kind of similar to your last paragraph.
Instead of having a web application with a typical frontend and backend, I have fantasized about thin UI/UX interfaces with an almost pure LLM backend. Just having one or more bots receive parsed http requests, CRUD-ing the data based on training and tool access, and responding back if necessary.
(I have a strong dislike for web development, so perhaps my fantasies are a form of escapism.)
Isn't that completely terrifying? Some of the last tiny shreds of human connection in the digital landscape (shared experiences and the human creator/viewer relationship) replaced by a relationship with a corporation.
If you think people are wasting their time scrolling reels now, the one social benefit is that you might have seen one of the same ones as your (human) friends. Imagine if that was gone. Truly horrifying.
> The same applies to software: you'll describe a problem and a network of agents will write a solution faster than you can Google it, download it, install it, and start using it. It'll work with your accessibility requirements out of the box; it's UI will be in your language; the data will be stored where ever you like; and so on.
This exists now.
You can have gemini AI - the that's built into google search - just make little applets. I just made one for a color picker, and generating palettes, including one that applies aces tone mapping. It showed made little adjsutable sliders and everything.
For a while, chatgpt web didnt count against usage, and you could use sol, it was isnane, you could upload a screenshot and just ask it to build out a little editor with threejs, and whatever else.
There's grok bot, dots, and other 'bots' that are just doing independent actions in the background. That can do digital actions like organize your documents, send emails for rebates, etc.
If you accept the shame, you can literally have bite sized story telling that are like mini soap operas, completely cheesy, predictable plots but that are very good guilty pleasures.
Will all these platforms just disappear? I think that the real winners will adapt to this new AI world, evolving their platforms around agent-based workflows.
Those who won’t will be just left behind (sadly)
I agree, this is the right direction to be thinking in. I’ve made a bunch of tools for myself with AI, been interested to see if I could release it, and found 10 open source projects that do some flavor of what I made, but with zero traction. I feel like the unlimited personalization of these types of apps is what’s going to prevent there from being “the free photoshop”, I think that everyone will just have their own personalized vibecoded photoshop that does exactly what they need.
Plus, most people don't use 90% of Photoshop. How does the saying go? "The average user only uses 10% of a software's features, but every user uses a different 10%."
Now, you can just prompt the 10% you need and not even have to use up your computer's resources with the rest of Photoshop. I didn't like a single one of the many Android TV video player apps. Most of them were way too big, had all kinds of features I didn't need, took a while to launch, had stupid "libraries" that you had to populate your videos into, and relied on third party lookup services to get things like movie posters and other metadata. Pre-2020 I would have just picked the least bad one and lived with it. Now, I just vibe-slopped a player app with only the features I want and nothing else.
I think the second order effect is that games and software become cloud only where you just get a video stream of the software so decomps can't rip it apart and rewrite in rust. Or that copyright law will make 1:1 replicas of software illegal even if the code has been AI transformed.
Just use it in your workflow. If you encounter anything that doesn't work, then vibe code it to make it work. I'm exactly using it in my indie game dev with heavy graphics workflow.
Something new will, practically by definition, also be quite rough around the edges because it didn't have the time to learn all the usability lessons. Linux for instance took decades to get where it is and some still say the year of the Linux Desktop hasn't arrived yet. Apple and MS are just enshittifying now. Maybe one could vibe-slop a duplicate of the good times of macOS, but I'll believe that when I see it.
If an AI tool could possibly replace Photoshop with a prompt and a few bucks worth of tokens, do we really need the app at all - why not just ask the AI directly to do whatever it was you were going to do with the app?
But then one step further, why should any of us have jobs at all? If AIs can do almost anything a person at a keyboard can do, maybe 85% of the quality, but instantly for anything for a few bucks or less, is there any point in paying any of us at all to do anything we could do at a keyboard?
I wonder if it's going to come to that in 10 or 20 years.
Honestly, if this topples Adobe from its unearned throne then fantastic. Adobe’s monopoly is a disgrace to design software and their apps should’ve gotten a lot more attention throughout the years than they have enjoyed historically—especially in the age of AI, where everything they do seems to be focused entirely on their useless Firefly being shoved into every corner of every app, bloating the hell out of already bloated as fuck software.
I’m forced to use Adobe’s apps because they are the golden standard at the moment but I wish with all my heart this to not be the case anymore.
Adobe fucking sucks.
Side-note to whomever attempts to build a new Photoshop: workshop better names. The ones on the article are woefully bad to the point of hilarity.
What adobe has done with their software suite is annoying as hell, but I was there in the late eighties, and there was simply nothing like Photoshop; it was a revelation. And continued to be for the next decade.
The throne was 100% earned. I would love to see Adobe dethroned now, but it definitely earned it in the first place.
I feel like a major problem here is that people are more interested in vibeslopping their own Photoshop clone than contributing to an existing one. This results in a situation where theres a million clones that split the market and don't gain any traction.
You can view it as a problem, or a point on a trend line where building software becomes ever easier and cheaper. If you follow that trend far enough, when you need for something Photoshop-shaped, you ask for it, and you get exactly the functionality you need. If you need it to do something PS doesn't, that capability just appears.
I've said it in other venues, but we're reaching a point where using someone else's software is like chewing someone else's gum.
One thing I don’t get about “personal software” is - why would you want something photoshop shaped, when you can describe what your image should look like? Most common issue - passport photos with specific background requirements and aspect ratios. Just take a photo on your phone, ask Gemini to meet the specs - you are done.
Yes exactly, you can just ask for the outcome. But PS is also a creative tool. If you want to do digital painting (in contrast to simply producing a digital painting), you may want something PS-shaped.
Or if you want to apply nondestructive edits to a photo, and you realize that PSD is actually a pretty safe forward-compatible option, you may want adjustment layers and a PSD writer.
I think most of the time people don’t want to use software, they just want their problem solved. But creativity is a notable exception.
It’s not happening now. These projects are basically spam and largely DOA. No community will coalesce around them, nobody will use them professionally, and their progenitors will get bored and move on almost immediately.
For me, I dont like photoshop and only have it to get lightroom so I can do basic editing on photos. I am in photoshop maybe 6 hours a year and only to do some minor edits or things I should probably do in another app like InDesign or whatever it is for layouts (I truly have no idea, but I'm not giving adobe more money).
For me, I just want to easily organize some folders, cull stuff, throw the culls into a marked directory, and process them to JPEG with some lighting adjustments since I shoot raw. Lightroom honestly is painful to use. I don't think gimp fills my needs since its more like photoshop. I'm happy to look at something else though!
Hopefully I'm not adding more fuel to your "Photoshop AI Slop" fire (which is well deserved), but take a look at redlamp.app - early days but may just become a viable LR alternative.
Not yet production ready although working pretty well.
I based it off babl, GEGL and MyPaint. It is binary compatible with gimp through xcf and also supports svg natively.
Since I’m a Mac user it uses metal rendering for speedy painting, gradient and filter previews, then commits changes through GEGL asynchronously. It does work quite neatly.
It already found a couple of bugs in GEGL and Gimp, which I have tucked in patches and tickets. My plan is to go through these manually and do contribute the fixes, if the community accepts them (and if they’re indeed problems) However I don’t think an LLM should send patches.
OK, so.. I get that, but is that model dead? Aside from marketing, is there any way to protect a true SPA from "Hey Claude, clean room this in 2026" - and then apply better marketing?
As another example, ScreenRun is amazing as a true one time pay, client-side app. I have loved that thing. Also, such a cool model. But are those days now over?
Meanwhile, photopea only works view a website for normies. It is ad-supported, so given all the work put in, and updates, and the fact that it is web severed...
I swear I thought my question was not that dumb, or is it? You tell me.
OK, I have thought about this more and I realized that I have never worked on compute intensive apps like Photopea, so I am truly ignorant here. I guess if there was a server-side rendered Photopea, it would probably not be supportable by free + ads. It might actually cost at least as much a month as the inspiration of the app.
I guess my point was, how can anyone protect any client-side IP in the modern era?
I remember using your tool a lot for years but in the past year or so the ads have made it unusable. It feels more like browsing ign.com with no adblock or something. Just brutally slow and intrusive visually speaking.
And at 8 Euro a month I can't quite justify the Photopea premium plan.
I use it enough I would happily pay say $50 for a self-hosted single user license that will not get updates. But not 8 euro a month forever.
I am finally forcing myself to un-learn the decades of Adobe muscle memory and replace it with gimp/krita. Or maybe I'll vibe up something that does exactly what want and nothing more; bespoke one-off tooling is just so easy to do now.
Never got to try out PhotoSuite, looks like it really was just ripping-off your code, the repo owner already deleted it, and now it forks PhotoCraft.
I have a huge respect for your work on Photopea, been using it constantly since the time I completely moved to Linux a year ago. It has the best Photoshop parity yet to find! Would you ever consider to:
1. Open sourcing your work (partially or completely) under some kind of a permissive/copyleft license.
2. Rewriting some parts of the website that require performance as WASM targets.
3. Using any modern JS frameworks, e.g. Svelte.
2) WASM is not faster than Javascript "by default". Both can be fast or slow depending on how you write it. I don't think having everything in WASM would make Photopea significantly faster. Also, Photopea uses many libraries as WASM (WEBP decoding, ZSTD decoding, JPG decoding, Harfbuzz, ... JXL / AVIF encoding)
3) I never used any Framework, but if it is just a bunch of a JS code, I think I managed to write an equally good JS code for the UI over the past 14 years.
For people interested in a Photoshop clone, https://www.photopea.com/ was amazing long before LLMs existed. It runs in the browser and was built by a single person!
So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.
I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.
It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already and engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good.
I like to make fun of Excel as much as the next guy and I realize my use of tabular data is very limited compared to the full abilities within the app, but what in the world in Excel needs to be rendered at 240fps?
I still feel that the cost of software is trending down, maybe saas providers will keep figuring out ways to add enough value to justify their sub prices, but my bet is against business as usual.
$260 / 12 = $21.67/month. Any person using Photoshop professionally will have no problems justifying that expense. Even if paying for the full suite, the cost will just be claimed as an expense and used as a deduction. One paying job will cover the fee while ensuring they are able to deliver a compatible file. The PSD file is a dumpster fire of a format with who knows how many footguns hidden within making compatibility a nightmare.
As a professional, there's no way I'd risk not using the real code. As a hobbyist, I can/have use something like Photopea.
"An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust".
They also have:
VectorCraft Vector illustration;
FilmCraft Video editing, color and sound;
LightCraft Photo library and raw development;
PrintCraft Reading, organizing and protecting PDF;
EffectCraft Motion graphics and visual effects;
DesignCraft Page layout and publishing
The thing is: there are color spaces, correct filtering etc, etc.
Sure you can do a Photoshop clone as in "Ps in 1990" if you just ask an LLM because then (and for years after) Ps itself got all this stuff wrong and people used it, professionally nevertheless.
But getting these things right requires, as-always, in-depth understanding of the theory behind it or the LLMs will gladly omit those parts.
Not least because the majority of OSS code dealing with those things gets it subtly wrong. And they've been trained on that.
A good start is btw. to ask your agent of choice to copy all theory/basics from OpenImageIO.
How do I know? I'm maintaining a closed-source, heavily LLM-assisted Rust crate that is the backbone of all image processing we do at my employer (kringers fossed it will be OSS eventually).
The amount of subtly-wrong- bites-you-eventually bugs I fixed (or had an agent fix, rather), despite tight specs and good tests, over the last 10 months, is ... noteworthy.
That said, for a lot of users it probably doesn't matter if interpolating between red and green means getting a muddy brown or that you get subtely wrong colors when you downsample and some (or quite a bit ) of aliasing when you do so more than 2× etc.
But while a lot of people want to prompt a clone of app X and an unexpected many also seem to have the patience for it: few have the background to get sth. out of that endeavour that will be genuinely useful in the end.
The CAD/parametric 3D modeling segment is another category I'm watching closely where a lot of people have the same issue w/o (yet) realizing.
And ofc, there are always exceptions where seemingly someone is behind the project who actually do know what they're doing. :)
All the failures and faults become training data. Even this conversation. Training data. It will “just work” eventually, or OpenAI will host vibe coded projects that are “ready to use” in a few seconds. Like a GitHub or docker registry where the admins are all LLMs satisfying the world’s software requirements.
Saying “this is subtly wrong” won’t do much in the training data for the same generation. Lots of this expertise is closed source for understandable reasons
My brother recently bought a used piece of industrial machinery. The $1500 control software did not come with it. In less than an hour, with no prior coding or vibe coding experience, he prompted claude.ai (yes the web version) to create a functional control app, nicely packaged as a .deb file for installing on linux. (It didn't cost him anything as he used my claude sub and it didn't noticeably impact my quota).
People are recompiling games, vibecoding Photoshop clones in the past week.
What does this mean for the American economy, 80% of GDP attributed to services?
Will every country have their own ecosystem like China?
What stops Canada from decoupling from US tech, and making their own software ecosystem? Considering the Europeans were already moving in this direction, can't they just recompile their own versions of software?
Is the future of software just cloud software? Advancements in local encryption like TPM?
I’ve decided to build my alternative because every time there is a prosumer tool I like (Pixelmator, affinity) they get bought out (affinity to canva), or the developers suck (Pixelmator developers cramming all features people wanted into a different “pro” version)
Interesting consequence of LLM is that anyone can now decomp anything and put it on github, putting it in the training dataset, and now it can be more easily reproduced. Binary moat is dead, I expect many more moves towards cloud
107 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 7.5 ms ] threadThe immediate reaction is to ask whether any of these would be good enough to replace Photoshop (or Pixelmator or whatever). That's a first-order question and it's an open one --- you probably couldn't replace a real workflow with vibe Photoshop today, but I wouldn't bet against that being the case a year from now.
But the second-order questions include consideration of the people who can't use Photoshop, either because of cost or (to me, more importantly) because of lack of platform support.
In a world where 90% of the functionality of things like Photoshop and Word are replaceable with personal apps, how much does platform support matter anymore? How much do platforms matter anymore? I'm a committed macOS user and have been since the TiBook. Will I be 5 years from now? I'm deeply uncertain, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that if I'm not a macOS user, I also won't be a Windows or Linux user.
Which is apparently impossible.
Who does Jony Ive work for now?
OpenAI Planning A 2028 Smartphone With Custom Chips
https://www.androidauthority.com/openai-smartphone-mediatek-...
Then there's things like properly sleep and suspend support.
The same applies to software: you'll describe a problem and a network of agents will write a solution faster than you can Google it, download it, install it, and start using it. It'll work with your accessibility requirements out of the box; it's UI will be in your language; the data will be stored where ever you like; and so on.
Instead of having a web application with a typical frontend and backend, I have fantasized about thin UI/UX interfaces with an almost pure LLM backend. Just having one or more bots receive parsed http requests, CRUD-ing the data based on training and tool access, and responding back if necessary.
(I have a strong dislike for web development, so perhaps my fantasies are a form of escapism.)
Please no. Enough with putting everyone into a box/label/profile. Have people be exposed to and interact with the multitudinal variety of the world!
If you think people are wasting their time scrolling reels now, the one social benefit is that you might have seen one of the same ones as your (human) friends. Imagine if that was gone. Truly horrifying.
This exists now.
You can have gemini AI - the that's built into google search - just make little applets. I just made one for a color picker, and generating palettes, including one that applies aces tone mapping. It showed made little adjsutable sliders and everything.
For a while, chatgpt web didnt count against usage, and you could use sol, it was isnane, you could upload a screenshot and just ask it to build out a little editor with threejs, and whatever else.
There's grok bot, dots, and other 'bots' that are just doing independent actions in the background. That can do digital actions like organize your documents, send emails for rebates, etc.
If you accept the shame, you can literally have bite sized story telling that are like mini soap operas, completely cheesy, predictable plots but that are very good guilty pleasures.
Now, you can just prompt the 10% you need and not even have to use up your computer's resources with the rest of Photoshop. I didn't like a single one of the many Android TV video player apps. Most of them were way too big, had all kinds of features I didn't need, took a while to launch, had stupid "libraries" that you had to populate your videos into, and relied on third party lookup services to get things like movie posters and other metadata. Pre-2020 I would have just picked the least bad one and lived with it. Now, I just vibe-slopped a player app with only the features I want and nothing else.
Out of curiosity, how much did that cost?
If an AI tool could possibly replace Photoshop with a prompt and a few bucks worth of tokens, do we really need the app at all - why not just ask the AI directly to do whatever it was you were going to do with the app?
But then one step further, why should any of us have jobs at all? If AIs can do almost anything a person at a keyboard can do, maybe 85% of the quality, but instantly for anything for a few bucks or less, is there any point in paying any of us at all to do anything we could do at a keyboard?
I wonder if it's going to come to that in 10 or 20 years.
I’m forced to use Adobe’s apps because they are the golden standard at the moment but I wish with all my heart this to not be the case anymore.
Adobe fucking sucks.
Side-note to whomever attempts to build a new Photoshop: workshop better names. The ones on the article are woefully bad to the point of hilarity.
The throne was 100% earned. I would love to see Adobe dethroned now, but it definitely earned it in the first place.
Then
>can this be done” at all? (...) The mere existence of these tools is proof that it can be done.
Then
>DISCLAIMER: I obviously can’t know whether any of these projects were definitely “vibe-coded”, but it also doesn’t matter
..????
I'll stick to gimp I guess.
I've said it in other venues, but we're reaching a point where using someone else's software is like chewing someone else's gum.
Or if you want to apply nondestructive edits to a photo, and you realize that PSD is actually a pretty safe forward-compatible option, you may want adjustment layers and a PSD writer.
I think most of the time people don’t want to use software, they just want their problem solved. But creativity is a notable exception.
If I have magic box that can give me anything, I'm not going to ask for tools and materials to build a house, I'm gonna ask for a house.
For me, I just want to easily organize some folders, cull stuff, throw the culls into a marked directory, and process them to JPEG with some lighting adjustments since I shoot raw. Lightroom honestly is painful to use. I don't think gimp fills my needs since its more like photoshop. I'm happy to look at something else though!
Not yet production ready although working pretty well.
I based it off babl, GEGL and MyPaint. It is binary compatible with gimp through xcf and also supports svg natively.
Since I’m a Mac user it uses metal rendering for speedy painting, gradient and filter previews, then commits changes through GEGL asynchronously. It does work quite neatly.
It already found a couple of bugs in GEGL and Gimp, which I have tucked in patches and tickets. My plan is to go through these manually and do contribute the fixes, if the community accepts them (and if they’re indeed problems) However I don’t think an LLM should send patches.
It was discussed here on HN yesterday and then, the anonymous person behind it removed the "Issues" section completely from their Github
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730
https://replayweb.page/?source=https://archive.org/cors/gith...
If I may ask, if you were to do this all over again in 2024 - 2026, would you choose SSR?
Wouldn’t that screw up his whole thing? Because now you need infra to render to free users?
As another example, ScreenRun is amazing as a true one time pay, client-side app. I have loved that thing. Also, such a cool model. But are those days now over?
Meanwhile, photopea only works view a website for normies. It is ad-supported, so given all the work put in, and updates, and the fact that it is web severed...
I swear I thought my question was not that dumb, or is it? You tell me.
I guess my point was, how can anyone protect any client-side IP in the modern era?
Still, all client side code is now just a couple prompts away from a clean room design, I am going to pretend that this was my entire point :)
And at 8 Euro a month I can't quite justify the Photopea premium plan.
I use it enough I would happily pay say $50 for a self-hosted single user license that will not get updates. But not 8 euro a month forever.
I am finally forcing myself to un-learn the decades of Adobe muscle memory and replace it with gimp/krita. Or maybe I'll vibe up something that does exactly what want and nothing more; bespoke one-off tooling is just so easy to do now.
I have a huge respect for your work on Photopea, been using it constantly since the time I completely moved to Linux a year ago. It has the best Photoshop parity yet to find! Would you ever consider to: 1. Open sourcing your work (partially or completely) under some kind of a permissive/copyleft license. 2. Rewriting some parts of the website that require performance as WASM targets. 3. Using any modern JS frameworks, e.g. Svelte.
1) About 30% of my original code is open-source as JS libraries: they end with ".js"-https://github.com/photopea?tab=repositories
2) WASM is not faster than Javascript "by default". Both can be fast or slow depending on how you write it. I don't think having everything in WASM would make Photopea significantly faster. Also, Photopea uses many libraries as WASM (WEBP decoding, ZSTD decoding, JPG decoding, Harfbuzz, ... JXL / AVIF encoding)
3) I never used any Framework, but if it is just a bunch of a JS code, I think I managed to write an equally good JS code for the UI over the past 14 years.
Can you settle an argument, perchance? Is it pronounced "Photo-P" or "Photo-pia" (as in "utopia")?
https://x.com/photopeacom/status/1492164676200841227
I had settled on the utopia sounding version but will try and think of peas now.
https://github.com/scosman/freecell
So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.
I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.
It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already and engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good.
Opus et all are able to do everything needed client side
I don't imagine that many of their big customers are fans of taking unnecessary risks to save what isn't much money for most of them.
As a professional, there's no way I'd risk not using the real code. As a hobbyist, I can/have use something like Photopea.
"An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust".
They also have: VectorCraft Vector illustration; FilmCraft Video editing, color and sound; LightCraft Photo library and raw development; PrintCraft Reading, organizing and protecting PDF; EffectCraft Motion graphics and visual effects; DesignCraft Page layout and publishing
Sure you can do a Photoshop clone as in "Ps in 1990" if you just ask an LLM because then (and for years after) Ps itself got all this stuff wrong and people used it, professionally nevertheless.
But getting these things right requires, as-always, in-depth understanding of the theory behind it or the LLMs will gladly omit those parts.
Not least because the majority of OSS code dealing with those things gets it subtly wrong. And they've been trained on that.
A good start is btw. to ask your agent of choice to copy all theory/basics from OpenImageIO.
How do I know? I'm maintaining a closed-source, heavily LLM-assisted Rust crate that is the backbone of all image processing we do at my employer (kringers fossed it will be OSS eventually).
The amount of subtly-wrong- bites-you-eventually bugs I fixed (or had an agent fix, rather), despite tight specs and good tests, over the last 10 months, is ... noteworthy.
That said, for a lot of users it probably doesn't matter if interpolating between red and green means getting a muddy brown or that you get subtely wrong colors when you downsample and some (or quite a bit ) of aliasing when you do so more than 2× etc.
But while a lot of people want to prompt a clone of app X and an unexpected many also seem to have the patience for it: few have the background to get sth. out of that endeavour that will be genuinely useful in the end.
The CAD/parametric 3D modeling segment is another category I'm watching closely where a lot of people have the same issue w/o (yet) realizing.
And ofc, there are always exceptions where seemingly someone is behind the project who actually do know what they're doing. :)
I can understand why you might write open source software for your fellow man but who wants to do it just for the benefit of OpenAI or Anthropic.
What does this mean for the American economy, 80% of GDP attributed to services? Will every country have their own ecosystem like China?
What stops Canada from decoupling from US tech, and making their own software ecosystem? Considering the Europeans were already moving in this direction, can't they just recompile their own versions of software?
Is the future of software just cloud software? Advancements in local encryption like TPM?
If you're a casual user, just use AI directly - upload image and tell model to remove background, or make it cinematic, etc.
If you're a professional, you'll want the best.
I’ve decided to build my alternative because every time there is a prosumer tool I like (Pixelmator, affinity) they get bought out (affinity to canva), or the developers suck (Pixelmator developers cramming all features people wanted into a different “pro” version)
Adobe Creative Suite Cleanroom Port to Rust
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981449
Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730
Which, taken by itself, is total BS. There are tons of good-for-nothing crapware that are a waste of time and space.