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.
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
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
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.
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.
I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.
Well… if it was a 4-day vibe-coding project, then that’s not a lot of effort, and I don’t think GIMP wants to deal with that scale of AI contributions anyway.
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.”
They aren’t saying that opening and saving their own files corrupts. They are saying their psd saving is 99% the same as adobe’s.
I know they are talking about PSDs, they listed it in their test suite. I read it as the test working for all but a few tools, but I guess they could just be talking about coverage.
Either way, it still does and will suffer from all the same issues I listed in my comment.
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.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered things in IT that “should be easy to XYZ…” That actually were a nightmare to deal with, I’d damn near be retired already.
And you’re 100% correct about Microsoft products. I’ll give you 1 guess what company was bragging loudly earlier this year about how much AI-generated code their software engineers are using.
I will be extremely surprised if this comes anywhere near gimp. AI is not at the stage were is can create amazing software all by itself. It will likely be buggy and/or feature incomplete.
From what I gather right now it’s the UI of Photoshop with capabilities of paint.
well fortunately for them, moth supposes, that they don’t need amazing software. they just need enough to beat Gimp, which has sucked since moth was a larva. it’s a rather low bar to beat.
I think gimp is great software, maybe you just haven’t given it enough of a shot to learn it.
It would be okay, if it wasn’t Ai. I think using LLMs cannot be guaranteed to be a clean room implementation.
Let’s grab our popcorn and watch Adobe fight AI companies on this. Because if this isn’t legal, then what does that say for everything else generated by AI?
What effort? Having an LLM churning on a problem isn’t effort.
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.
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.
the room can be spotless, but if your reagents are all tainted you’ll only ever get slop plagiarized from other projects. but sure, enjoy your “clean room re-implementation of Photoshop” XD
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
Oh yeah my coworker was walking about this. Someone spent about $2k in tokens recreating the Adobe suite on windows, macos, and linux. Crazy what AI is able to do nowadays.
I don’t think I will use it but I feel like in a year or two, software written like this will be everywhere
I don’t think it’s a great idea to use vibe coding on an existing project like GIMP unless you want to fully convert it to vibecoding. The moment you start vibe coding major features you lose all oversight of what the code does.
That’s why I think this is a great way to use vibe coding. Just clone the entire Photoshop project and re-implement it all with vibe coding in Rust.
Rust is a difficult language to write compared to something like JS, but at the same time it’s memory safe and can prevent a lot of bugs. That’s why it’s a great language for AI to use.
