Over the final multiple months I have been tracking AI guys trying to create vibe coded clones of famous apps, particularly Adobe’s apps which have continually been the most pirated apps since the 90s.
There are now concerning a dozen vibe coded attempts to copy Photoshop and several another Adobe apps, not including dozens of forks of them. People akin this aren't fair openly copying Adobe's apps. It's Microsoft, Avid, Autodesk and whoever alternatively is in their sights next including equivalent devs big and small.
Automated or semi-automated cloning to pilfer income distant from developers isn’t new. In the first 2000s whenever Google released Adsense hundreds of Adsense filled spam sites sprung up and cluttered the hunt engines. If your own location always had a famous leaf or article, bots would copy your pages and republish your satisfied on spam sites, stealing traffic distant from you. That’s the identical unethical and spammy behavior we are seeing today whenever AI guys vibe-clone a copy of your apps.
Directly stealing the appearance and awareness of a merchandise but changing the name is what the counterfeit products market does. This is the identical item but in software.
The amount being spent in AI tokens (API costs) is in the thousands of dollars per project. The largest attempt to vibe copy Adobe’s apps has complete 70 devs at the period of penning (update: 165 now, it is rising daily) using Claude to present 100s of drag requests per day. The amount they are spending on tokens must be complete $50,000 in the final two weeks. I volition not name this project and don’t desire to provision them traffic that they do not deserve. Those dozens of devs volition be spamming all the social media platforms alongside their alt accounts anyway.
Yet notwithstanding this not one of these vibe coded projects has been capable to create a broom motor that matches Photoshop’s broom engine. The achievement of their brushes collapses formerly the canvas size is complete 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes activity smoothly equal whenever you’re operating alongside 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera. If you’re trying to build a Photoshop competitor in the twelvemonth 2026 you have to be construction the motor archetypal and afterward adding all the advanced features on top later, not the another way around. Unless your aim is fair to create headlines and advance an AI business.
In the Photoshop copy that is getting the most attention, on the advertisement size canvas test complete Copy/Paste and the Undo stack is extremely dilatory and momentarily freezes the use all time. This is essential material that decent application developers had operating fine 25 years ago whenever we had sole center computers and nowhere near to 1GB of memory. If you can't get decent achievement today on multicore multi gigahertz computers alongside many gigabytes of recollection you or your AI are not doing a fine job.
Those defending the mediocre achievement of vibe coded apps have parroted the celebrated lines AI guys used in the former - “It is lone days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They create the error of equating individual app betterment period alongside generative AI betterment period (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in individual hours, not lone a few days old but nearer to two or three years old. If a broom motor or change tool plant seriously following the individual equal of three years of betterment that is a display of bad preparedness or an AI example not doing a fine job.
Brush achievement aside, all of these projects battle alongside 100% document format compatibility and lossless depiction editing. Image previews during applying filters are downscaled to low res previews to keep usable speed. Colour overview rendering and gentle proofing is hit and miss. Support for the huge figure of color profiles and imprint profiles is bare. On several platforms many average fonts aren’t accessible since they necessitate licensing. So alternatively of innovating and pushing onward they have successfully rewinded the clock rear to 1996 whenever there was a deficiency of industry standardisation, compatibility and quality.
They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor whenever Affinity Photo is liberated and Photoshop expenses $200 a year. Not extremely astute economics.
They rant and assertion the era of subscription application is finished, but they are subscribed to AI services and AI software. The amount they are paying to AI companies is far higher than the disbursal of Adobe, Autodesk, Canva or Maxxon applications, and the outcome is barely usable vibe coded apps that volition need to be continually maintained at elevated cost.
Vibe coders brag concerning their app binaries being much smaller than Adobe’s app binaries, as if that has item to do alongside the norm of the code. It does not. Application code (which is fair text) takes up extremely small disk area in any application. What takes up the most amount of disk area are the frameworks, libraries, models and media resources an app ships with. The additional advanced and capable an app is the larger it volition become. But the size on disk is mostly irrelevant in the age of terabyte+ size disks. The size of an app in memory, the app’s achievement and its stability are how you fairness the norm of an application.
Continuing from the final point, they and net commentors have frequently made claims that Adobe’s apps have “bloat” in them, but if you ask them to meet requirements what they average by bloat they cannot. They volition revert to use binary size again. These are mostly group who have no cognition of programming and parrot all other. An app either has fine norm code that performs fine or it doesn’t. An app can have lots of redundant functions in it but functions do not run unless they are called by a tool.
Whether application is vibe coded or not, open origin application has rarely challenged business software. Krita has been about for years and is a decent application, but Clip Studio Paint’s subscriptions acquire Celsys millions of dollars a year. Nobody is giving up Clip Studio Paint for application that has coarse edges. Blender is a awesome application, but costly elevated end apps akin Maya are motionless the 3D animation applications of choice for larger studios and business productions.
In a 2026 study of 150 CG manufacturing companies in Japan, whenever asked for their chief 3D animation suite 58% named Maya, 17% 3ds Max, 12% Blender, and 7% Cinema 4D. The image is akin elsewhere.
Commercial apps innovate and lead. Open origin apps akin Blender prosecute the lead. Innovation expenses a lot of money. Clip Paint Studio, Maya, 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, btw, are all subscription applications. But since those apps aren’t in petition by pirates Autodesk has not informed the dislike and bullying campaigns that Adobe has received.
And whenever it comes to client assistance things rotate into equal sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot assistance a earth person base, particularly whenever those two guys are hunting for underage children to conversation to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).
Here we see Photoshop versus a vibe-cloned copy of Photoshop. We test broom blow achievement on a billboard-size canvas alongside the broom set to 1000 pixels size. Photoshop handles this alongside no issue. Its business competitors battle to equivalent broom performance. The vibe-coded clones execute the worst (basically unusable).
The saddest part in all this is how it feeds into the ignorance and online dislike run against Adobe that we have seen in the final 5 or so years. Some have labelled it ‘Adobe derangement syndrome’, but any it is it is a mix of inventory market manipulation (some acknowledge it) and rage that Photoshop has been getting harder to pirate always since haze services were unified into Adobe’s use suite.
An example complete of the benevolent of misinformation spreading low-lifes that infest Reddit and LinkedIn.
We should apparent the air here. Subscription application exists whenever haze services and haze compute are unified into a application suite. It is the lone way to pay for the operating expenses at broad scale. If you eliminate these contemporary services there is constricted advancement in application development. You'll have to move all elevated disbursal compute locally which is impractical since most users cannot oversee a elevated end workstation GPU or haze server.
Instead of hurling dislike address and bile at thousands of application engineers who guide innovation at ample companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), display them several gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone alternatively follows. Just since they activity at a big business doesn't average they are committing individual entitlements abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and dislike alternatively of urging everyone to be greater and bigger.
If several group have an matter alongside companies being large, they now have the tools to vie against them. But alternatively of vibe cloning mediocre norm rip offs why not build new first imaginative applications about caller ideas that have never been tried before?
But afterward again, vibe cloned piracy is a demotivating force. It ruins the incentive to create. Why create new first apps and games if person comes alongside and rips you off?
You’re giving yourself too much credit Brandon. There are dozens of group in your GitHub repo and they are all subscribed to a chatbot that is doing nearly all the coding following being fed screenshots of Adobe’s apps.
