That might be a letdown for some.

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... does nice charts

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 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.

Why would I release it? Everyone can vibecode their own.

What counts as an OS? For that matter, a Photoshop? And are we talking Photoshop 1.0, CS2, or CC?

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.

Everybody (not actually everybody) has wanted one for 20+ years, and almost nobody made it.

being able to build the stack and create bespoke solutions with llms's is incredible..

idk why people get mad about vibe-coding. if ur little brother can make a Spotify clone with Claude in a day, shouldn't that mean that you as a dev should be able to create something 100x better that makes Spotify obsolete?

good ideas / feasible novel architecture design will be the only thing valuable..

- 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!

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Moving the goalpost.

(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.

That said, it's been a whole lot of fun to build, and the real wins are in the tangents it lets me go off on. I spent a whole day building a "badge lab" and just adding random features and sliders. I had a sunset motif in the background of a garden planner I was sketching out, and it led to this, which took a day or two: https://orochi235.github.io/experiments/interstellar-horizon....

I think people are overestimating the danger AI poses to their livelihood, and underestimating how damn fun it is to use.

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.

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.

An example:

I do game dev as a hobby, and target the browser as the platform.

Before I would shim general purpose tools into the development lifecycle because I was more interested in building games not tools. Now, I'm accumulating tiny single purpose tools that fit my usecases much more closely.

Where before it would be super expensive and probably inappropriate to create tightly coupled tools to a single data model / usecSe now it's super cheap, just part of the sdlc.

The end result for me is a much more ergonomic and taylor fit experience that helps me achieve my end goal. Am I going to release these tools? Absolutely not. It wouldn't make sense for anyone outside of potsandpans' gamedev loop.

So, I think this accusation is a bit "old world" thinking. I don't expect to see a million photo shops. There's already general purpose photo editing software: photoshop and gimp. I _might_ expect to see savvy devs and artists using photoshop less and using custom tools more. We might not even see or hear about that, other than when photoshop sales drop.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The author seems unwell

So that it would be easily to add functionalities with plugins - for file reading, oganization, edit, and everything.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

The result is always the same: a beautiful UI, everything feels smooth and responsive, but the core logic doesn’t actually work.

I think this is exactly what the author is talking about.

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.

That, too, we're not seeing that at all.

You can also find this in science, I feel like software is about finding the Gauss’s law for the dozens of electrostatic principles the masses keep coming up with.

AI strips away the need for simplicity by making brute forcing details via verbosity that ruins the need for "good" software, and makes all software by definition unmaintainable since maintainable product as a unit has to be simple enough for a LLM or a human mind to understand.

Currently a human context window is in 100s of billions of tokens, while LLMs seem to max out at 1M.

For anyone thinking but humans can't produce all of the text verbatim, that's the difference b/w humans and machines we can parse and take the most essential parts from 100B token context it's just are speed of prefil and recall is slower. And we memoize learning so if we know X then all variants of X are learnt on the same foundation.

Human learning is so very different from LLMs is so very fascinating as a trad "AI engineer", well some person who has worked and built/shipped ai agents and models at scale.

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.

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.

Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.

Isn't this exactly how many technologies get started?

A PC used to cost as much as a very nice used car, and had few practical uses cases, as one example.

That's exactly my point. Photoshop is the wrong bellwether with which to test the vibe coding value premise refuted by the author.

It's like asking where all the skyscrapers are when The Home Depot opens up in your neighborhood.

And as someone that's used photoshop professionally for decades, pixel manipulation is precisely what it does.

Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.

I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.

A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.

A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.

Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.

And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.

These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.

Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.

AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.

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.

This is why I insuniated that people here don't really understand photoshop as a business and customer, only see it as an app.

And yeah, it will be better in one year but so will Adobe's inbuilt AI tools.

We have not seen designers abandon Adobe for AI and i am willing to bet that wont be true, not even in this decade.

  [0]: https://www.photopea.com

My use of the word “system” is very intentional vs. something less qualifying like “program”.

Edit to add: my take is proper system engineering and design basically requires general intelligence, so the bar for LLMs to reliably produce high quality systems is AGI.

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.

I also think most people fall into the Fiverr camp: they need something that’s “good enough,” and don't have a particularly critical eye for detail - in which case even one-shotting with the latest models, gpt-image-2 or nb2 can get you there.

> 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 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.

My point is that AI bros are forgetting that the LLM is only as good as the person using it. If you don't sufficiently understand the problem you're solving, your solution will be terrible. If you believe that AI will simply take that work away from you and do it itself, you should ask your favorite LLM to explain how LLMs work.

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.

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.

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 ?

But I don't think I'm going to email the mods and beg them to remove me from some list they added me to without notifying me.

I don’t feel like apologizing for complaining about the drivel some write because they don't like LLMs.

It was not my most substantial or productive comment, but I feel it is fair enough and did not target anyone in particular.

Contributing to HN is not worth it.

I'm spending my time, compromising my privacy, and advising potential competitors on what works best in my workflow. It's often not appreciated, so I might as well stop commenting so much.

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.

(Nope, Krita and GIMP are not good enough)

- Export in very high quality without estimative upscaling.

As I said, it's not exactly realistic to ask for numbers and a Photoshop competitor within two months.

Although software companies like to disclaim all warranties to the extent the law allows, neither the market nor the FTC will allow you to breach contracts, make outrageous false claims, or offer products that destroy life and property.

AI cannot and will not behave responsibly. I’m not opposed to AI, but I use it as a tool that I supervise. I review and test what it produces. People and companies that fail to do that will ruin their reputations, I predict.

Because I'm seeing that happening more and more. Just as one random example, I've lost count of the number of vibe coded captioning apps I've seen for FCP, because it's a known pain point in the software.

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.

Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.

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.

https://bambulab.com/en-us/filament/collections/functional-p... goes through the various filaments and their different strengths and weakness, depending on the kitchen sink drain pipe you're printing.