Is it my imagination or have there been a bunch of similar submissions in the last week? Is one-shotting the Adobe suite in Rust the new pelican on a bicycle?
I've seen these posted and amplified in a few places over the past few days now, has anyone who is familiar with the adobe suite actually tried these in depth and can comment on their fidelity/quality?
I tried Lightcraft (Lightroom alternative) for some color correction. It worked fine and the UI is very similar to Lightroom. Though I must disclose I'm not an advanced Lightroom user by any means.
Yes, like last time this was brought up, you can criticize them as both vibe-coded and far from complete, but their Illustrator clone Vectorcraft is quite functional at least -- I think it is more useful than Inkscape now, even in its incomplete form.
In discussions about 'coding being solved' and the ability to produce large, well working projects with AI, a common question was why we do not see a vibecoded PhotoShop clone then.
This claims to be that.
It's relevant for discussion here about the quality of vibecoded software.
It's "free" since Canva bought it. They basically use it as funnel for people to buy Canva subscription (online sharing, ai features).
They keep adding features and recently added scripting which was one of the last things that kept professionals from using Affinity. And you can see it in industry (atleast graphic design) even big names are testing how to switch.
I wonder which Adobe apps do they mean. From the screenshots/videos it looks like it has zero overlap with the functionality of Photoshop or Illustrator. This is just a slop generator.
It can only be an alternative if 1) it is an exact clone of Adobe apps including feature set and the UI/UX, or 2) it has a different design but provides the same features along with good UX and can help user complete various tasks effectively (which requires tons of UX research on its own). Even small details can matter.
Which is why people still go to Adobe products despite similar products exist, especially for people who are getting paid to use software. They want things to simply work.
I very much doubt a vibe coded application can achieve that, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
DesignCraft is also a portable app. It works fine, behaves really good. Some things are a little different. You can import idml files (exported from InDesign) and what I see as real progress that its format is described (both Affinity and Adobe use closed formats).
Played around with the photoshop equivalent. It's pretty impressive what it has so far, everything seems to work on my existing PSD projects. The main thing I can't seem to do now is import Actions.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] threadThere is a full Ars Technica article about this one [1]. Already posted to HN few hours before [2].
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/software-is-over-bold-ai-...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000426
I'm not seeing Photoshop or Lightroom there. Maybe they only have an Illustrator alternative.
I checked only the Web version, since the Desktop version requires signup.
[0] https://tenzen.studio/photon/
This claims to be that.
It's relevant for discussion here about the quality of vibecoded software.
They keep adding features and recently added scripting which was one of the last things that kept professionals from using Affinity. And you can see it in industry (atleast graphic design) even big names are testing how to switch.
Which is why people still go to Adobe products despite similar products exist, especially for people who are getting paid to use software. They want things to simply work.
I very much doubt a vibe coded application can achieve that, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.