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.
No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs.
What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.
Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.
Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.
Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.
This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic. There aren't many useful, high quality APIs out there without a companion app these days.
I encourage you to ask members of your household what apps they use which don't connect with any other apps, sites, or companies. I think we'll find the number is pretty low.
In your mind, what are some apps which don't currently exist which would be solving a bespoke household issue that non-techies will be reaching for vibe coding to solve?
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not convinced the puddle is very deep. It's really hard to compare taking a photo with vibe-coding an app.
The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.
Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.
It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.
Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.
I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.
Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.
As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.
The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.
They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.
You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.
No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.
As noted above, it's the mechanical design / CAD that has to be seriously learned to do anything useful.
I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.
If you think of apps in the traditional sense I think I agree with you, but I have a feeling things are about to become a lot more messy.
Grandma might not even know she's building her own calendar app.
I don't think we are that far from being able to ask a general purpose AI to "help me not forget my family's birthdays" and it creating and maintaining code for that purpose. Not quite an app, but more than a one off script, I think AIs are going to unlock this weird situation where they're running a bunch of barely organized code almost as an extension of thinking.
Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.
The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.
The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.
> reducing the cost
The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.
As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.
It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional.
This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.
That still seems like a simple CRUD app.
even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.
He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.
Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.
I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.
After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.
Not exactly revolutionary in the way you’re claiming.
It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, the data grows 10x and emailing spreadsheets back and forth becomes too error prone, or any other of the well-known ways that this falls apart.
Those of us in software always cringe and want to use a database.
“Vibe-coded apps are the new spreadsheet.” Seems about right, and the problems will be similar.
My use of the word “system” is very intentional vs. something less qualifying like “program”.
The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is. Of the remaining who do, I would not be shocked that they’re capable of asking an LLM to produce one for them.
This is also probably why nobody is vibecoding photoshop, why bother when a model can do it?
Lately ChatGPT can generate complex diagrams with lots of text so I used them to make slides.
And often from data it makes up!
As per https://xkcd.com/1015/, I suspect many people are doing this and the artists hate all the examples even more than the average consumer who simply treats it as a sign of low-budget work.
My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror.
Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p...
That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.
Nowadays though, with relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
Sorry what? This is nonsense.
> as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.
ahh there's the rub.
So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.
So what about the folk who don't use it professionally and have no access to cracked copies anymore ?
Would you rather press a button and go through a simple process that's normalized across all crud apps or talk to a chatbot every time you want to solve a problem and invoke external apis?
> 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.
A lot of ai hype IS premised on ai being able to vibecode photoshop.
The difference is that normally, people would perhaps pay a company to buy a PS license, or pay a professional to edit their images, however now this market segment will just use VLMs to edit the image to what they need.
Some of those tools will use VLMs to provide more advanced features instead of implementing it themselves, making competing for a broader subset of users feasible.
2. Design professionals sell their work to businesses.
But if businesses start using AI image editing instead of contracting professionals, then Adobe won't have a market of Photoshop buyers.
Before you say that AI isn't good enough for the kind of business which pays for professional design, in one year it probably will be.
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
e.g.
>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.
This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.
Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.
As best I can tell, the author is saying that it's unrealistic to expect that a vibecoded photoshop would YET exist since just because you can use AI to help doesn't make the task much easier or quicker. If this is the right take, then I guess he's really talking about AI-assisted development (i.e. AI coding used as a tool by a human developer), rather than "vibe coding" in the sense of "here's some specs - write this for me". With AI as a coding tool, then all the hard work is still left to the human - coding it up once you've specced and designed it was never the hard part.
With Karpathy-style vibe coding - just tell the AI what you want it to build - it's either going to succeed fast or fail fast, so "where is the vibecoded Photoshop" is then a reasonable question, albeit a rhetorical one, reflecting that this type of "gimme X" vibecoding isn't able to produce something of that nature, so of course if doesn't exist.
Mostly they upvote the titles of articles, that align with their assumptions, and fill in the blanks with their prior thinking.
That's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.
A lot of AI writing is bad and you notice it immediately. AI changes the cost calculus towards unnecessary verbosity and exploring paths that lead to nowhere. Writing block is usually because you don't have anything to say. If you had anything to say, the words would just flood out of your fingers. Easily two thousand to four thousand words per day. You wouldn't be able to keep up physically with your own brain.
I don't know or care whether the blog post is written with AI, but it's not a very good article, because it fails to explain what "the accusation" is, who "the accusers" are and who is being "accused". Despite it being the core part of the article and it being in opposition to the title the article endlessly drifts in its own vagueness, where nothing is concrete and everything is unsaid. It's a puzzle where you're supposed to put the pieces together, you're supposed to just get it and know what the author is thinking, without the author ever having to bother explicitly telling you, so that no matter what interpretation you choose, the author can always gotcha you that you didn't get it, when "it" was never conveyed.
The Photoshop and the gate/level paragraphs are easily read as a criticism of vibe coding, but the accusation paragraphs are a defense of vibe coding.
Honestly, this is giving me "heads I win, tails you lose" vibes.
I read the post, but I find it incoherent.
The rough argument being made is that a bunch of folks go around lobbing vibe coding accusations at LLM users, because those folks are afraid that LLMs are taking their coding jobs. And that this anger is misdirected, since coding wasn't actually the moat in software development, and LLMs aren't making much of a dent in software architecture or product design.
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.
LLMs are approaching the affordances that OpenSource claimed to offer but never did.
Non-coders are discovering the basics of - for example - Python scripting and running with it.
If this gets easy enough - questionable so far, but maybe one day - all code will be "Do this thing to this photo/document/music project."
The big toolbox products will become redundant.
Everyone is distacted by content generation, but if LLMs get good enough it will be possible to go back a step and give everyone a toolbox factory they can use to imagine and build whatever they want, with full control, instead of the current stab-around-until-you-find-something generative approach.
The same happens with whatever tool you vibe-code. You get the average of the worst quality open source versions that exist, combined with some randomness.
This is not "do one thing and do it well", this is "do one thing no matter how".
Why do you believe that? What if I care so much about black and white and need a specific algorithm, isn't it much better to do that through a tool I can control rather than any proprietary one?
And I don't have 10k -100k to blow on Nvidia cards nor to buy a few 100gb of RAM.
I suspect that if you start seeing vibecoded "PhotoShop alternatives" productised, they won't look like PhotoShop at all: They'll be something like a bunch of image manipulation tools with an agent loop and scripting, to make it easier to create and run a bunch of 0.1%-Photoshops on-the-fly and save/reuse them.
So something more like Claude's artefacts support, just hiding the techie bits for users not comfortable with that, with specialised tooling.
I'm guessing we'll see a bunch of apps like that eating into various traditional big monolithic tools.
This isn't new most businesses are run on scripts that process data. The only difference now is that more people can write them instead of paying for an app.
So the narrative here is wrong. Because vibe coding an app is overkill, in the same way that paying through the nose for a giant app that you only use one basic feature set of is.
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.
High quality code hasnt lowered in cost. Arguably it's gone up actually because more slop needs to be cleaned up.
And, for all people drone on about "customers/the business dont care about code quality they care about results" the indirect side effects of code quality are things they do care about deeply they just cant connect the dots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you serious?
So how long do we have to wait? The reality is the actual output doesn’t match the hype at all.
Software engineers should be getting laid off all over the place, there should be a decrease in hiring period. This is not what’s happening.
GPT 5.4 came out at the start of March, GPT 5.5 end of April.
What do you expect, that we all go to market with a Photoshop competitor within two months?
Edit: and I can't provide any more replies since once again some automatic system or a mod rate limited my account for whatever reason.
That's a very, very weird take on many, many levels. Could you elaborate a bit about where that view came from, how often you use AI, what's your career etc.?
Before Codex with GPT 5.4 and 5.5 I was working on a single feature only, no parallel conversations, and a ton of permission prompts would make it impossible for the agent to even work for five minutes on its own.
Times have changed.
Talk about the numbers.
Cost reduction and revenue generation.
Anything else irrelevant - nobody cares. The world is about making money and moving things forward.
As I said, it's not exactly realistic to ask for numbers and a Photoshop competitor within two months.
Not really, the "people on here" rather consider that Anthropic and co. are profiting from you by making you think it's better to give them money to develop your app rather than do it yourself or hire a developer. The hype is there to steer you towards AI.
20 hours a week must be quite expensive in tokens.
People on here talk like it was some belief or suggest I am somehow profiting from "hyping" AI.
Is it so hard to believe that agentic coding now works? Engineers are taking it up left and right.
Edit with reply: I can't, because the app is still in the works. Also my HN account is again rate limited and I won't be able to post more comments.
Edit number two to the other comment:
It's not really that expensive. With Anthropic it would be $200, with Codex the $100 subscription is sufficient.
It is interesting phrasing when you say that the providers "are making me think" the use of their service would be better, rather than me reaching this conclusion myself after using their services extensively for my work.
And honestly, I think I've had it with HN. I can't even participate properly in the discussion, maybe because some moderator thought my comments and opinions unworthy again.
My gut reaction looking over your account is that you mean well but get a little heated. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147587 responds to no one in particular and calls HN drivel. Don’t do that. Thoughts like that are normal, but expressing them is difficult to do in a substantive way. It’s often better to not say anything if you feel yourself getting upset. (There are plenty of exceptions to this, but you have to do it in a way where you’re writing for the audience here, not for yourself.)
I think if you really put your mind to it, you can write substantively and stay off the rate limit list. Good luck.
"I am 100x productive with AI, I can ship in days what took months before" and "oh no, you don't understand, it's not really possible to vibecode Photoshop" found elsewhere in this thread.
If I were magically 100x productive, the first thing I would do would be to recreate Photoshop.
I ask because Photoshop probably wouldn’t have a market if it was introduced in 2026.
What would you be hoping to accomplish by recreating Photoshop?
Canva and Figma are layout tools, not for pixel editing.
Recreating it would make it faster and cheaper, something that has been driving software for decades.
> 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.
For example, I've had quite a few situations when I asked Claude Code to do some manual work for me, assuming it would do manual edits across several files, but it instead decided to write a script, and even a small test suite for it. It's a small encroachment so far, but I don't see any limitation for it gradually taking on actual product decisions.
The LLMs suck at testing still, so the feedback cycle still requires human input
Same way as LLMs cannot code anything complex, they cannot test complex scenarios.
The only underlying rule that I see is: the more complex a task is, the lower the probability of success. That's it. And it's the same exact rule that applies to humans. The difference though is that we're seeing an exponential growth in AI capabilities, which are then rapidly disseminated on a scale of months, and we don't see such capability increases in humans.
As I see it, anyone whose mental model is built on what AI can or cannot do is going to have a very bumpy decade.
> but I have a lot of machinery in front of them to enable it
So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
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.
(Also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633)
It’s written mostly in very readable Pascal with some 68000 assembly.
For those not familiar (or not old as me), Pascal was popular in 80s. The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like.
LLMs are good at converting programming languages; it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to convert it to Swift, Rust, etc.
[1]: https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...
> 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.
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.
So that it would be easily to add functionalities with plugins - for file reading, oganization, edit, and everything.
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Performance art.
The author seems unwell
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.
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
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.
Same goes for slack.
https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
Similar to the GitLab model.
Example limitations:
> Mobile notifications without limitation for eligible communities
> Mobile notifications for up to 10 users for other organizations
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.
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.
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.
Trust me this version of me can't write code better than an LLM. I think even the LLMs from 2 years ago could do as much.
Only thing we have solved with LLMs is how to generate code, as in literally converting what you type in as text into something somewhat working. Fixing the details is impossible for AI.
Today and beyond.
Now Open AI and Anthropic are launching own Service firm/wing for maximizing ROI. Direct Competition. Huge Loss for Indian IT Service Firms.
They paid AI providers to Train own automated competition end to end so much so that they are learnt the gaps and how-to own the market by corrections, private IP Source code access and embedded expertise extraction (stopping short of calling it literal corporate espionage, they got all the know-how and especially for modernizing legacy tech and integrations).
They are untrustworthy especially where IP is involved.
Indian and other IT Firms who did not use private self-hosted AI for important things nor monitored the usage and did not train their employees to think what ( or how much) of our institutional knowledge goes out to third-party are already facing trouble.
A proxy for it would be we see a huge wave of lay offs.
This is not happening.
We can now simply buy an artificial form of intelligence to solve intellectual problems. That doesn't mean we can buy our way into solving every problem in a week.
Building Photoshop or Excel still has a huge intellectual cost. We can use AI to help us get there, but it won't be free, it's just getting marginally cheaper.
That, too, we're not seeing that at all.
"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.
Because selling shovels is a guaranteed way to earn you money, unlike digging for gold.
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.
> there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising.
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.
And, well, to display the image I guess. Or maybe you'd want to print it, but the printer needs firmware, and firmware is an application itself.
Everybody (not actually everybody) has wanted one for 20+ years, and almost nobody made it.
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.
What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?
Why is this the measure of success?
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.
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.
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.
If we wanted to replace any of these operating systems in 10 years, or needed to, the best time to start would be now.
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.
“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!
Aperture discontinued, one of the engineers in the team built a replacement, yet it's not Aperture.
Pixelmator did the "impossible", Apple bought them instead of doubling down on their talent and resources.
Small yet powerful editors like Acorn and Camera Bag Pro has no practical competitors in their spaces.
Technical problems are easy, yet humans and things involving human interaction is hard. You can't solve non-tangible problems by remixing tangible bits of code.
Heck, even Photoshop revamped a couple of dialog boxes, and a number of people got angry, because it behaves slightly differently and throws decades of muscle memory out of the window, and that costs people considerable amount of time.
I am upset with the fact that we are accumulating code debit faster than ever. In the most optimistic view, we could pay off those debit in around 10+ years (assume somebody care pay the money to buy token to clean up those).
That meant we need to suffer 10+ years of low quality code and software.
recently, I tried to make AI write Long Form Novel.
The first problem I see is, AI have no idea what is important.
Teaching them when and where to use active voice/passive voice, who needs to be the subject, when to change the focus is just impossible. They love to add comparison and contrast on something least important. They love to use long list of adjective, which is unrelated to the context in current story chapter, just because those adjective are in my character file.
Understanding which problem is important in when and why is something hard.
I think same problem would appear in larger computer programs.
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.
(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.
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.
Go suffer until something good happens in your fingers.
I can totally see how ai could do the same thing to all sorts of art industries that have not had their Napster moment yet.
For me, even as a broke student "Free!" was not the charm, but "accessibility". I made music, played in orchestras. I know the effort required, and never wanted to steal livelihoods from people, but music before Napster was inaccessible.
Some free radios, expensive CDs and cheap cassettes with bad sound quality. It was impossible to explore and listen a broad spectrum of music.
Now I can try and buy albums. Yes, the publishers still earn way more than the musician, but it didn't start with Napster. It was still like that before Napster.
FWIW, I bought and still buy music rather than streaming it, I'd happily continue doing so. I just want DRM-Free high quality music to listen on various devices of mine, that's all.
Being creative is a different mindset, and is very different from just sitting in front of a computer, bashing keys and doing well-defined things. In fact, high quality software engineering is a kind of creativity, too. Needs raw and real brain power, blood, sweat and tears to accomplish in a high quality manner.
This is what enshittification of everything looks like. Belittling any human being trying to build something genuine with their sincere effort. Instead, we accept the whiplash. "More code, faster!", "Minimize time to market!", "Milk the user as much as you can, we need the monies!", "Masters demand growth, demand monies!". For what? We shall receive a liveable life. Instead we accept when the demand is collectively rowing boats as slaves, lulling ourselves "at least we are alive".
Everything can be done in a better and dignified manner for all parties, but it doesn't generate money. The money you won't be able to spend, take to your next life, or afterlife for that manner.
But more power to you and your welder.
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.)
Moving the goalpost.
That might be a letdown for some.
[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... does nice charts