Even if it works despite being AI slop that’s been developed in a mere 4 days (?) and somehow has all these contributors, I’m not sure I agree with the idea.
It’s cool that they went with Rust for it, but I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.
If it works then I guess it’s the same end result at the end of the day, but it would suck if GIMP doesn’t end up being the one to put a nail on Photoshop’s coffin after all these years of serious development by humans.
Edit: I already see the kneejerk dislikes coming, I’m just interested in starting a conversation about the idea of it, I also dislike the fact that it’s AI slop as I already implied. I’d appreciate joining the conversation instead of dislike bombing with no argument.
It would be okay, if it wasn’t Ai. I think using LLMs cannot be guaranteed to be a clean room implementation.
I think there are good reasons to be wary of slop that don’t involve animorphing into an MPAA lawyer and parroting screeds about how you shouldn’t download cars or whatever.
But also fuck Adobe
It’s funny to see corpos get mad but honestly a project this big, spun up this quickly is almost certainly an unmaintainable mess.
Looking at the PR’s & git activity & the interest in this whole project, I doubt LLM powered humans couldn’t keep this running if nothing unexpected -like a lawsuit- happens.
My personal experience with LLMs is that they are very good for adapting existing code to newer libraries & various other changes.
On the one hand, I am opposed to AI slop.
But on the other hand, I am greatly in favour of anything that makes life even slightly more difficult for Adobe.
This is a tricky one.
On the one hand, I am opposed to AI slop.
Me too. But what is Ai slop? To me it is either fully vibe coded, or partially. Either way the user of the Ai ends up not knowing exactly what is going on. That is slop. But if its very carefully used, analyzed, understood, iterated and tested, like a human code would be, then I cannot call it slop. But it doesn’t take away the problems using Ai in the first place. There are inherent ethical issues, and questions if the licensing and copyright will become an issue one day.
In short, not every usage of Ai is slop. But every usage of Ai has ethical unanswered questions.
It is built by AI agents, for AI agents. I guess it’s interesting seeing software built from the ground up with hooks built in for every single action to be controlled by an AI agent, in that sense you could direct your own AI agent to use this to create/edit images. But even then I wouldn’t trust this thing to edit and save over existing images, it is way too new and will have plenty of non-obvious bugs that would get embedded in every image you save.
And like most vibe coded AI projects this one will probably cease being maintained long-term.
If you’re actually going to work with images you plan to keep long term just stick to GIMP, Krita, etc.
From their own documentation:
opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in our mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set
Just what I want in my editing software, the assurance that my saved files will mostly render properly when reopened in the same program…
This is exactly what will sink any attempts to do similar things, it’s not the broad functionality of the software, it’s all the billions of edge cases.
The LLMs will be able to get all the general requirements mostly right, and that’s where it will stop. The subtle errors and bugs will pile up steadily as the codebase grows too large and complex for even frontier models to accurately summarize, and the people who vibed it to begin with don’t actually understand what is happening, so they can’t troubleshoot effectively.
Automated bug reports will pile up, agents will be dispatched in greater numbers, leading to cost issues and further complicating and compounding the errors in a bloated and convoluted codebase. The leads of the project will get burned out and abandon the project, leaving a giant, rotting, husk behind. Software that was forever, “almost working properly.”
Most of these are very modular, so should be very easy to maintain. I guess we’ll just have to see.
Software that was forever, “almost working properly.”
That describes how I feel about MS Word quite well.
As I have said many times: license washing works both ways, this is the end of proprietary software as we know it, no more would I have a need to install a sketchy driver inside a windows VM just to use some crap USB microscope
I think this is a nice test to see, if license washing machines can defeat adobes lawyers.
AI slop.
even the people over on hacker news concede that they are unusably buggy so… i think vibe coded slop is vibe coded slop - use gimp
Do they even say which version of Photoshop they’re mimicking?
Arguing such thing is “open source” is misleading as 1/ contributors can hardly call themselves “authors” of this code 2/ nobody can demonstrate that the plagiarizing engine they used did not plagiarize proprietary source code or source code published under an incompatible license.
as in “you cannot claim a room is clean if you have never been in it, haven’t built it, and cannot even know what’s in it”
Not to mention the hoard of software patents Adobe will unleash their horde of lawyers with if this becomes anything more than a bad joke. Although that would make for an interesting precedent.
Either Adobe wins which maybe will shut up vibe coders or vibe coders win which maybe will shut up Adobe. Either way win win
Just more bullshit hype. This project will go nowhere.
anything to avoid having to use Gimp, moth supposes. moth has been using Gimp since moth was a larva, and it’s always been one of the worst experiences in open source software.
Imagine being this mad at gimp. lmao
moth isn’t mad at gimp for stagnant mediocrity any more than moth is mad at league of legends for it.
If the authors used the same method to improve GIMP, they’d be introducing a bunch of slop code to GIMP. This code is not going to be of GIMP quality.
I also doubt this will hold a candle to GIMP for the aforementioned reasons. It might appeal to a small audience, but I do not expect it to dethrone GIMP any time soon.
It’s an interesting exercise. If agentic AI is capable of easily recreating commercial software, I wonder if that’ll make some software companies change their stance on it.
Not interested at all in using it though. I’m sure it’ll be buggy as hell and I much prefer using software developed with actual care and purpose.
