I don't think that's the direction this is going to take.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't think many people subscribe to photoshop for just occasional image edits. It's very much a tool mostly used by professionals that do a lot of it
Back in the day when a license was expensive, then yes, you either were a professional who used it a lot, or like the rest of us poors, you used a cracked copy.
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.
I don't think you understand Photoshop and its business if you think people are replacing it with ChatGPT or Gemini... the point of the article is that the whole "SaaS is dead and AI killed it" media narrative is bs propelled by the ai hype cycle.
That's only half the author's point. The other half is that the "gate is where it always was" (= the part that's not just grinding out code to spec), and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.
Photoshop (and many traditional SaaS products) solve hundreds of different use cases. Most users probably only care about a handful of them. You don't need to do every use case to kill SaaS if you have a tool that can allow users to solve their 2-3 use cases on their own with custom tooling.
And the point of the comment you are answering is that the market you are talking about has taken on a different form.
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.
I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post.
The post author is calling out the "Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?" folks for empty accusations. The "accusers" in their post are THE people asking that question, not the AI users.
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
> I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post.
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.
That's a bit like asking "Where are the vibecoded AWSs?" or "Where are the vibe coded Office 365s?"
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.
IDK, but I have three or four vibe-coded 0.1%-Photoshops already - small utility apps, all self-contained, client-side, static, zero build-step browser tools, each of them solving a very particular problem for me.
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.
And most importantly, you don't care at all if the tool you vibe-coded is any good. If you write at tool that converts an image to black & white, you are the kind of person who doesn't know or care what KIND of black&white it is. The fact that there are many algorithms to choose from would never cross your mind.
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".
Not quite the direction I expected that to take, but I do agree with the broad strokes. LLMs lowering the cost of code isn't exactly solving software development, and is definitely not solving product development.
AI just frees us from always writing all the code ourselves. You still have to think at the architecture, and figure out what the product is and what features it should have.
Except in a small minority of circumstances "lowering the cost of code" doesnt really help if the code which was lowered in cost was crap code.
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.
Maybe not photoshop but I’m building in the live VFX (visual effects) space, for example think touch designer or Houdini (but simpler).
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
That's because testing is a layer above, and that requires effort from people, and people don't want to put in the effort or lack the skills to properly test with them. I think LLMs are superb at testing, but I have a lot of machinery in front of them to enable it
> There are levels in this work. Level 1 is the typing. Syntax, semicolons, the years memorizing pointer arithmetic and which header file the function lives in. Level 2 is the verifying. The harness. The test suite. The reflex of rejecting the ninety attempts that almost work and shipping the one that does. Level 3 is the deciding. What to build at all. Which architecture survives contact with the real world. (...)
> 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.
...and ultra high velocity single human person agent swarm vibe coded replacements for existing software and SaaS should come out en masse. Where are they?
You seem to be arguing that vibecoding photoshop wasn't possible up until 2 months ago, with GPT 5.4/5.5.
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.
"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.
> 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.
Actually where I get the most impressed working with AI is kind of at Level 3, where I ask for a feature and AI will suggest going further with it, or doing it in another, sometimes better, way.
Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
Well, not photoshop yet, but if you're in the scene of raw photo editing, you know there are several small "new players" clearly coded in a couple of weeks that are pretty promising.
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.
Made me recall that meme about the frequency of miracles over history, saying that it plummeted with the invention of the camera, regained its momentum with Photoshop, and now they added a twist saying that miracles skyrocketed with the popularization of AI
If Photoshop can be vibe coded in a couple of weeks, that's superintelligence.
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.
I expect a coding model being able to clone apps like Photoshop in the next two years.
But creating an app like that from scratch without a paragon (which is what Adobe did with Photoshop) is a lot harder.
Just to be clear, I spent Billions of tokens last month, dick'ing around with AI, do I think it can do my job, sure if I was as checked out as I am feeling being mandated to only use AI for work...
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.
+ can you even define what is Photoshop? What capabilities does Photoshop have? Ignoring all the edge cases that it supports, what Photoshop allows you to do.
No it's not. The point is that if building software is indeed way cheaper now, then someone should be able to guide AI to build Photoshop, Linux, or Excel while providing direction, but having the billions of tokens of human intelligence now provided by AI.
This sounds to me like saying: "if poverty has decreased, everyone should be able to buy a 40m yacht."
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.
I created Hosaka Studio using Claude Code. I wouldn't call it vibecoded however! I'm already a professional software dev and it was three months very hard work getting it to work properly across half a dozen different Linux distros, X11 and Wayland compositors (there's still a known issue on Nvidia+Cosmos).
So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
It could be said vibe coded competitors to any proprietary software. If everything proprietary was "forced open" by AI what would be the economic effects?
We've had OSS equivalents of almost everything for decades, you can install a mature Slack clone for $0 since 2015. Yet people don't because of laziness and brands are strong.
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.
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.
I think one of the major reasons why it’s not here is because most AI tools are great for getting a prototype built up but undertaking a program like Photoshop which we can assume has a couple millions of lines of code is actually not easily replicable by vibe coding.
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.
Second sentence form the article, "If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now." My answer: it is. Maybe we don't have a bunch of photo editing apps but it sure seems like we have a lot of vibe coded commercial and non-commercial projects being created. If i have to see one more vibe coded agent harness I might actually lose it. And I wouldn't call it all slop
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.
The biggest reason they don't exist is that you can buy them today. Why pay thousands of dollars and spend hundreds of hours to vibe code a photoshop when you can use the real, existing photoshop or one of its competitors immediately for a fraction of the price.
Same question I ask, it’s free money, why isn’t a million people asking Claude to build it?
My guess is the lack of training data and understanding of the problems it solves, but AI was supposed to fix this already?
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 preliminary research have found a "downward pressure" in software quality, meaning AI assisted coding is already breaking things. I expect small firms to abandon updates altogether, re-writing the core parts of their code with prompts at every "update".
People are not upset because "Level 1" was taken away from them.
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.
yes, I didn't feel like addressing the "point" that creatives are higher order beings that must be shielded from harm by everyone else. everyone else's jobs are being automated by machines and computers, outsourced to the third world, and undercut by legal and illegal immigrants. had been for decades. that was fine, this is fine also.
Creatives are not higher order beings. They are human. The thing is, we shouldn't stone creatives for being vocal, instead we should join them and try to protect our dignity and human side rather than accepting what's being forced upon us.
Being creative 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.
His argument is the equivalent of saying in ~1910 when the 1st mass produced Ford car came out "Where are the carbon brakes? Where is the hybrid motor system? Where is the ABS? Where are the rear parking cameras"?
The only people with higher expectations of the AI boom than the optimists are the pessimists. The forecasting I've seen [0] is that AI will be in a position to vibe-code things like Photoshop with some human assistance by around 2027-2030 if the current trends continue. Maybe fully autonomously in the mid 2030s depending on how many human-hours a basic clone of Photoshop takes to build.
There are plenty of vibe-coded apps out there, I am sure. Mom and pop store fronts, "wellness trackers", todo managers - trivia of that sort.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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Performance art.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Sure, I'm still the one _deciding_, but AI suggested things that I would never have thought about.
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.
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.
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.
So yeah, it's coherent, complex and non-trivial but also absolutely not accessible to anyone who can prompt.
Same goes for slack.
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.
Why is this the measure of success?
This perhaps isn't an issue at any meaningful industry as I think there is little room in the space for a new OS to take off, but within hobbyist circles it seems it's becoming a problem. On subreddits such as r/osdev, a lot of interesting-looking projects are being called out for their code having a lot of AI hallmarks: commit history showing an entire OS with a shell and GUI being written in a week, almost exclusively very large, non-atomic commits, comments that randomly include words from a different language, and snippets of code that are blatantly plagiarised from well-known projects in the community.
It's such a strange thing to see, because it's an area of programming that has almost zero practical need these days. We already have three big desktop operating systems that cover 99% of use cases, and there are already projects that fill most other gaps. Unless you have a really specific problem that can't be solved by patching Linux, writing a whole new OS and everything that comes with it is unlikely to be worth the time. IMHO, the only reason to write an OS in current year is for the hell of it; if you're really interesting in programming and computers, you like solving problems, and you like building large, complex systems, writing an OS can be a really fun long-term project. If you do none of the work and simply leave an LLM to plan out the system and solve all the problems, you gain absolutely nothing from it.
If we wanted to replace any of these operating systems in 10 years, or needed to, the best time to start would be now.
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.
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.
Happy I can use Claude for more trivial things, but if the AI labs wanted an actual benchmark, Photoshop or Davinci Resolve would be it.
For 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.
Being creative 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.
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
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.