YHK - yet another hacker news clone

This is the kind of thing that is very easy to validate. Boring, but very easy.

Just revisit this discussion in 6 month and 24 months.

Really?

I tried the Photoshop one when they promoted it a few days ago here. I loaded up one of the client projects I'm working on right now and I could barely move the document or do anything it was so laggy and every single button/feature I tried to use had some kind of bug.

Maybe they've fixed everything in 2 days but I kind of doubt it.

I tried the wasm version that simonw kindly hosted for them... https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/photocraft-web-...

The very first thing I tried to do - create a new document at a specific resolution and DPI - didn't work. It completely (and silently) ignored the values I entered.

It's still impressive in some ways to be sure - but I agree the marketing I've seen for it suggested to me that it is more done that it appears to be. It's the common theme with LLM developed that marketing is pushed far too early in the process.

> and you probably don't want it because the apps like Adobe's are full of so much legacy anyway.

I'm not an artist, but isn't that what people are interested in sticking with the incumbent? See: google sheets vs microsoft excel.

I'm sure that is true. On the other hand, the majority of their customers are likely using these tools for work and larger organizations are paying for the licenses. People in school for the fields that use these tools are probably being trained on Adobe products, with some discount for the school and the students. I don't think these vibe-coded apps are going to get much traction, there's a whole entrenched ecosystem around Adobe products.

My distaste for vibe coded apps aside, I wish them the best of luck.

And those free alternatives have existed for years

I suspect the reason alternatives haven't taken away marketshare isn't because of the software itself - it's because of the industry around it treating it as the standard. That's not going to change with a vibe-coded alternative

You're free to use Gimp today. Almost zero professionals actually do.

As a power user of Photoshop, I will say yes, most people use about 3-10 features that adobe offers.

But there are thousands of free tools for those people already, the point is this guy is saying he cloned the entirety of the adobe creative suite with vibe coding in a week. That's not true. He made a bunch of simple and buggy "creative suite flavored" apps. That's a completely different thing than what he claims.

Joel Spolsky has a famous post about this:

=-=-=-

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

=-=-=-

Also, there are many image editors _already_ out there of varying levels of power and ease of use. Some open source, some commercial.

And yet Photoshop still rules.

Why would these users go for i.e., gimp? Following this logic gimp is a better choice.

Last time I installed photoshop the core application was relatively small, it's just that they cobbled on a few gigabytes of locally-stored tutorial material for... I don't know why.

I still regularly use the Photoshop 7 I bought in Community College in the late 90s on my modern Windows 11 machine and in a VM on my Mac without issue. Its got 99% of what the newer version has for what I use it for.

The first version I actually purchased was CS2! Over the years I have probably given Adobe like $3,000. For Photoshop. Joke is on me, honestly. I agree with you - I would gladly pay for good software. That is what surprises me so much about Adobe. They think their shit doesn't stink. They think they have it made. So they continue to drag ass on innovation, keep prices high, etc... If they released a Linux stack and kept their pricing sane, without hostile patterns around subscriptions -- they would continue their dominance for years to come. But that is certainly coming to an end when an enterprising individual can sit down with a stack of tokens and rebuild their software in a few days or weeks.

I'm comfortable with several tools of the suite. So I went to the repos, the README felt odd. I checked the issues, and decided it wasn't worth installing.

I do want some open source Adobe suite clone to work. I just have far more fate in tools like Krita that don't give me a feeling of being fooled and sold a toy even if it's free.

In fact the open source project is there for profit as the easiest way to install it is to go to their website, where they also offer AI credits to use with those tools from $8 per month to subscriptions far more expensive if you need more credits.

<< I'd like to see how far echelon takes it

This will be the real test. I am an amateur, who needed some sprite editing, video edits and music changes. And I didn't use artcraft ( I might now though ) -- I vibe coded my own ( which brings me to another the other part upper echelon may be slowly realizing: they are not needed ).

> "Everybody just complains ... and ... we say it's taking energy away from GIMP."

It's almost like Hacker News is a giant group of people, and different subsets of people comment on different subsets of articles (aka, the Goomba Fallacy).

> I'd like to see how far echelon takes it.

Fascinating, I didn't know one of our resident "IDEs are obsolete and I never use them" commenters was demonstrating the complete uselessness of their mindset in production! Usually the vibe coders are cagey and never share their amazing 10x applications. Now we see why.

> but there's room given weeks and enough tokens to get this into a usable state,

There really isn't. I've certainly been down this road trying to understand the hype. The more complex the application gets the more the models will buckle under not having a solid foundation to work from, applying hacky patch after hacky patch. Simple changes will take 30 minutes, break three other things because the tests they write are trash, and introduce new edge case bugs. We've been hearing about how software development is over with every model release for the past two years, with the biggest upswing being since last Nov, and we're still hearing "just a couple of more weeks". When do we face reality?