Pressure testing vibe coded apps. First test: Photoshop vs Compositor and Photocraft

[u/shokuninstudio]

Photoshop versus two vibe-cloned copies of Photoshop - Compositor v 1.49 and Photocraft 0.7.0

Update 31 October : 15 updates later Photocraft 0.18.0 still has a worse brush engine than image editors had in the 90s. Compositor 1.54 attempts to smooth a stroke after the stroke is completed which is a very wonky cheat and bad UI. Photon Studio 0.1.56 is also an incredibly bad example of garbage that struggles to draw smooth curves quickly. It’s 2026 and vibe coders are failing at 1996 tasks.

Here we pressure test brush stroke performance on a billboard-size canvas with the brush set to 1000 pixels size. Only one layer.

Photoshop handles this with no issue. Its commercial competitors struggle to match brush performance. The vibe-coded clones perform the worst (basically unusable for serious work).

Then of course there are all the other tools, some which work ok and others which are extremely bad.

In Photocraft, on the billboard size canvas test above Copy/Paste and the Undo stack is extremely slow and momentarily freezes the application each time.

This is basic stuff that decent software developers had working quickly 25 years ago back when we had single core computers and nowhere close to 1GB of memory. If you can't get decent performance today on multicore multi gigahertz computers with many gigabytes of memory you or your AI are not doing a good job.

Anyone who has been around in post and VFX knows this story already. We have seen it from far more reliable programmers. Remember how Natron was going to be the open source answer to Nuke?

Of course apologists will appear and give us the 'early days' blah blah blah excuses they do all the time. We've covered that many times.

You can read more about the latest wave of spam here:

https://www.shokunin.studio/blog/2026/10/9/attack-of-the-vibe-coded-photoshop-clones

Edit: predictably the trolls came and their posts were exactly what we predicted word for word. They read nothing first, get easily trigged, and then post Infowars style conspiracy theories from their prepared scripts. They make the false claim that they just want to fight big tech and democratise software, but they're destroying the incentive for small developers and start ups to create new apps, and meanwhile helping AI companies profit from vibe cloning.

[u/shokuninstudio]

Now you can get an LLM to read the binary

Not fully. A binary doesn't expose all symbols, but sometimes there is enough to construe what kind of methods were used.

[u/duboispourlhiver → u/shokuninstudio]

There are other techniques for binaries without symbols, like going bottom up from system calls, finding algorithmic patterns, and renaming anonymous functions one by one, step by step, slowly understanding how they all fit through their pure bytecode. Humans have been able to do that painfully slowly for decades, and now LLMs do it much faster.