No. They suck the oxygen out of the open-source ecosystem for other more credible software, such as Photopea or Gimp or FreeCAD.
I'd like to see how far echelon takes it. The current iteration is somewhat unusable, but there's room given weeks and enough tokens to get this into a usable state, and I'm interested in nuking the entire Adobe business model from orbit.
And haven't we had enough decades for GIMP to get air? I'm actually a big fan of it and it's my primary image editor, but the amount of hate it gets on this and other sites is incredible. Everybody just complains that they want it to work like Photoshop, and now a guy is making that real and we say it's taking energy away from GIMP. That doesn't track for me.
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?
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 ).
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).
For example, I love GIMP but holy shit it was a downgrade from Adobe in most ways.GIMP should stay GIMP, though, I wouldn't want my tools being completely overhauled in terms of UI and workflow anyways. I'm sure the old heads who put TLC into it would be strongly against someone using AI to significantly rewrite it at base, but also changing the interface and how it works significantly enough to matter to users. It's a sad way how it's been gone about, but in a sense this new software is building on GIMP (among many, many others) shoulders by developing openly and allowing the lessons on how to do things be adopted and not re-learned.
I find such vibe-coded efforts to resonate with me, because they reflect the same impatience I have. Impatience with enshittification of the commercial offerings, impatience with OSS following suit without realizing it (most modern UI/UX philosophy is driven by needs of enshittification), impatience with OSS being dominated by fakers and itself becoming a business model. Impatience with broken software.
Vibe-coding can be a way to vent the frustration, and in this case, it even turns into a spectator sport. Most of the vibe-coded projects I do, and that I see people I know doing, share the same, single, deep motivation - "I want a software that does this particular thing right now, and without all the bullshit". The vibe is that of awe, but it starts rooted in anger.
It seems it's buzzing because it make people who post about it, buzz.
We live a strange time.
I find that unless I have very detailed specs with rigorous completion verification/criteria (manually atm) or tests. It’s like 60/40 at best.
And adding all the tricks only gets me to like 75-80.
Tbh I am using cheaper Chinese models (ds4.1f) and only pay for the $20 plans from the us labs
This is why you see all of these headlines about porting things that already have years of human work as deterministic guidelines and yet absolutely nothing worth using in production is being vibe coded from scratch. Don't let the hype/FOMO get to you, you are not alone, that is just what the people selling you the hype want you to believe.
But it'd be nice to someone to throw enough tokens to make some parity Adobe software... like OpenAI wasting 10m on 1m math problem poor waste of resources... spend 100m and kill and charge $10 instead of adobe $50.
IMO it is vaporware until shown to be otherwise.
I'm not an artist, but isn't that what people are interested in sticking with the incumbent? See: google sheets vs microsoft excel.
> A quixotic new project takes an AI-first approach to battling Adobe, and while it’s unclear where it leads,
I would not hesitate to subscribe to a version of Adobe CS that is more or less feature-frozen at CS1/CS2, with all engineering effort and subscription money going towards bug fixes, optimization, adaptations for modern OSes and hardware, and code correctness. Can you imagine how insanely good Photoshop CS2 would be today if they’d spent all the time since its release working on those things instead of endlessly tacking on mostly useless gimmicks!? Its stability and performance would be a moat unto itself.
It isnt that there is no market for a cheaper version but people forget the amount of craft it takes to get something from 80% to 99%.
If all you can add is baby sitting agents, then you will never reach beyond 80%. Yes, spend 10m on tokens and 2 years improving and it may become useful but isnt that how it always was? Ela figma and canva?
Fascinating stuff. I'm glad somebody else is doing it, and happy that I'm not doing it. Yet. But I will certainly be watching with interest.
I am a professional coder with decades of experience. I use AI regularly, but so far use it very tactically. The big challenge I struggle with at the moment is whether I can trust current-generation models that seem to be increasing in power exponentially at the moment with big tasks.
--- Just to qualify for your arbitrary impressionistic standards on who gets to say what about ArtCraft....
Photoshop: Used it for years. I have a perma-license CS6 copy that runs on Windows only. I sometimes (rarely) boot up my Windows partition when I have particularly complex edits to make. A UI that has rotted out over time. No way I'm paying the extortionate rental prices for current-gen Adobe tools. Their entry-level software seems to be toys, and are not usable for anything serious.
Corel Photopaint: I worked for Corel. I actually really like PhotoPaint, which at least follows a Windows UI convention. Much easier to use than Photoshop; but I have not used it for many years.
Gimp: tried it. Rotted out UI, and an absolutely incomprehensible UI convention (if any). I cannot use it and will not take the time to learn it. On Linux, I very occasionally use Gimp, but I loathe it.
Krita: So much easier to use than Gimp, excellent for consistent and modern UI conventions, but currently missing important features.
ArtCraft: I have not actually tried it, although it sounds very much like what you would expect from vibe coding: buggy as heck, feature deficient, and definitely not ready for serious consideration. Yet.
To be honest, I do most of my graphics work in Inkscape these days (lots of vector icon design). Brilliant UI, consistent UI conventions. Very usable. But mostly useless for photos.
Noting that this project is examplary experiment that may demonstrate whether the state of genAI can produce complex software before an explosion of token consumption as the code base grows, or even collapse.
In my experiments, it collapsed, each time I tried. Every 6 months or so I take the challenge. Unless a human intervenes of course. Basically dictating what genAi should do, which becomes more painful than it's worth automating code generation.
That being said, as somebody who views Adobe products as borderline spyware and STILL rocks Adobe Photoshop CS6 (the last non-SaaS version), I'm not exactly going to shed any tears of sympathy for them.
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.
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.
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.
Just revisit this discussion in 6 month and 24 months.
From the other thread he said he wanted to hold off posting it here until it was more ready.
>IMO it is vaporware until shown to be otherwise.
You can download and run it today.
So even if these tools never reach 100% parity with Adobe, if they offer the basics, and they're free and open source, it will be a win.
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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...
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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.
My distaste for vibe coded apps aside, I wish them the best of luck.
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.
You're free to use Gimp today. Almost zero professionals actually do.
Their best strategy, so far, has been to create new "mobile" versions of their apps where they can iterate faster.
I downloaded this on one of my Linux laptops this morning. Immediately I did some quick editing/drawing and was like, "well, this completely fits my needs for SVG editing now".