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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Funny how that works both ways.

"I am 100x productive with AI, I can ship in days what took months before" and "oh no, you don't understand, it's not really possible to vibecode Photoshop" found elsewhere in this thread.

If I were magically 100x productive, the first thing I would do would be to recreate Photoshop.

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Can I ask why? Specifically, why Photoshop and not Canva, or Figma, or Lightroom?

I ask because Photoshop probably wouldn’t have a market if it was introduced in 2026.

What would you be hoping to accomplish by recreating Photoshop?

Do you use Photoshop? The underlying engine which gives support for layers and smart objects is in itself such an amazing piece of tech that nobody seems to get even close to (and I’ve tried them all). The brush engine is fantastic, liquify and the general support for plugins, and heck, just the basic math behind the filters.

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.

I'm not being argumentative; I was genuinely trying to understand why you would aim to recreate Photoshop in particular, because Photoshop includes such a huge range of functionality. If it's about recreating the brush engine, that's pretty achievable. I would be curious to learn why Krita is not enough though.

Context: I've developed multiple Photoshop file format parsers/writers and know Photoshop at a very deep level. And would never want to replicate the specific set of tradeoffs Adobe made in the 1980s.

That’s fair, it’s just that a lot of the functionality overlaps in very rewarding ways, even if you only use the overlap 5% it’s incredibly frustrating to not have that function when you need it

There is nothing close to Photoshop (or the Affinity suite) that runs natively on Linux. Despite how niche that market is, one could make big bank if they could magically create a valid alternative out of thin air. I’d pay hundreds of dollars for it myself. I don’t even care about PSD compatibility.

(Nope, Krita and GIMP are not good enough)

Okay, well there's a huge difference between Photoshop and Affinity, because Affinity includes an Illustrator and InDesign alternative as well.

What specifically do you need to do in Photoshop? Photo editing? Design? Illustration? It sounds like you have a concrete need if you're willing to part with hundreds of dollars. I've developed a number of graphics apps over the years, so my interest is not academic.

Sure. Where is the vibecoded Figma or Lightroom?

The vibecoded Figma is Google Stitch [0] and Pencil.dev [1] and many others. But that's not what I was asking; I was asking why PS in particular.

  [0]: https://stitch.withgoogle.com
  [1]: https://www.pencil.dev

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