[stevex]

I don't think that's the direction this is going to take.

Replacing a mature app with an incredibly wide audience and a million use cases may or may not be possible, but what's actually happening is that people are making an app that does exactly what they want, and using it to solve their own needs.

Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data. No Excel required.

Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.

[netdevphoenix]

Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs.

What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.

Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.

Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.

Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.

[joenot443]

> neither will the one off random app that only your household uses

This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic. There aren't many useful, high quality APIs out there without a companion app these days.

I encourage you to ask members of your household what apps they use which don't connect with any other apps, sites, or companies. I think we'll find the number is pretty low.

In your mind, what are some apps which don't currently exist which would be solving a bespoke household issue that non-techies will be reaching for vibe coding to solve?

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not convinced the puddle is very deep. It's really hard to compare taking a photo with vibe-coding an app.

[jeroenhd]

> would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs

The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.

[saulpw]

Similarly, it seems like people are finding out the hard way that coding is the easy part and software design/architecture is much harder.

[zeroonetwothree]

It was always the hard part, hence why experienced eng get paid 5-10x what new grad do. It’s not because they type faster.

[mitkebes]

>printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

I'm curious if AI will make that part more accessible. You can ask Gemini to make you a parametric openSCAD model and it can do a pretty good job for most designs I've tried. Then just plug in your measurements, export the stl to your slicer, and print.

[fragmede]

3D cad is avoided by having a critical mass of other people putting their cad online. I used https://makerworld.com/models/77668 to replace my one that broke. Easy-peasy.

[hombre_fatal]

The people empowered by AI don't have to be nontechies, just everyone who has the will for an app to exist but didn't have the means (like interest) to yak-shave into a software engineer just to build one.

It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.

Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.

I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.

Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.

As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.

The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.

[zeroonetwothree]

Practically speaking it’s rarely cost efficient to vibe code your own all compared to buying. It might cost $100-200 in tokens alone and then there’s the time cost, maintenance, etc. Paying $10/month is cheaper.

I’ll only make an app if there’s nothing else comparable out there (surprisingly common)z

[iinnPP]

It's "free" if you want it to be.

[CalRobert]

I think there's a use case for LLM's being able to treat websites as API's (I mean, it is an API, really, running on port 80/443) but this is why attestation seems designed to ensure only large companies can do this and not end users.

[shlant]

> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.

[hgoel]

It's really funny to be declaring the idea of 3d printers being ubiquitous as dead because they weren't a smartphone scale change in how the world works, while pretending that 3d printers aren't more common and accessible than ever.

[zardo]

Yeah, a better comparison than the smartphone would be something like a table saw. You don't assume everyone has one, but it's not very unusual to have one in the garage.

[hgoel]

Yeah that's a great comparison.

[quacked]

> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.

[dTal]

You're quite wrong.

You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.

No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.

[quacked]

How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.

[fragmede]

A Bambu Lab P1S is $600, and then you gotta buy PET-CF filament, and there's shipping consider as well, so let's say ballpark $800 to start. They make more expensive printers too if you have the budget for it, but the underlying technology is mostly the same. Filament comes in 1kg rolls, and small stuff is like 50 grams, but a large piece of pipe including support structure could be as much as 500g, so if you end up printing a large amount of large items, eg https://makerworld.com/models/1441653 instead of https://makerworld.com/models/77668, which is 2g, and cheaper PLA, filament costs are going to add up.

https://bambulab.com/en-us/filament/collections/functional-p... goes through the various filaments and their different strengths and weakness, depending on the kitchen sink drain pipe you're printing.

[lstodd]

I actually printed a few PETG ones. They are nigh indestructable compared to PVC.

As noted above, it's the mechanical design / CAD that has to be seriously learned to do anything useful.

[joenot443]

> They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure

You and I totally would, but we're nerds!

Think of how much coaxing it takes to get the average North American homeowner to replace a leaky shower head or a spark plug. A lot of normal happy folks will spend their lives not really learning to fix things much, and that's quite alright, IMO. We don't all need to be good at everything.

[flohofwoe]

I have my doubts, yes there will be tinkerers who build their own apps, but this will be roughly the same crowd who today tinker with home automation, soldering or model trains as a hobby (or as Douglas Adams said: "I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand" - just replace "programming" with "vibecoding").

I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.

[netdevphoenix]

Grandma likely isn't able to use most existing web apps beyond facebook, her default email client and little else either.

Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.

The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.

[Klathmon]

> I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.

If you think of apps in the traditional sense I think I agree with you, but I have a feeling things are about to become a lot more messy.

Grandma might not even know she's building her own calendar app.

I don't think we are that far from being able to ask a general purpose AI to "help me not forget my family's birthdays" and it creating and maintaining code for that purpose. Not quite an app, but more than a one off script, I think AIs are going to unlock this weird situation where they're running a bunch of barely organized code almost as an extension of thinking.

[goolz]

Ya I wholly agree. The barrier to entry for new SaaS products also got really low for the KPMG-backed PE darlings of the world.

[dannersy]

> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.

> reducing the cost

The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.

[netdevphoenix]

> The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.

[bradley13]

Exactly this. I have an acquaintence who is a wine connoisseur and collector. He has done technical project management, but does not program himself. Over the course of several months, he has produced an app that manages a database of the wines he has.

It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app. In addition to maintaining the obvious data (name, year, winery, notes, etc.), it can take a photo of the label, parse it, and fill in most of the information automatically. It can generate all sorts of reports and summaries. Finally, it looks incredibly professional.

This took him somewhere around 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time. He has no plans to commercialize the app - that's not the point. The point is: on his phone, he has an app that he wants, and the satisfaction of having created it himself.

[swatcoder]

> 6 months of fiddling with a couple of different AIs in his spare time

Six months of fiddling and $X00 in subscription/token fees to make a DIY inventory management app that's going to need regular attention and revision, with ongoing service fees, to accommodate not-quite-right implementations and hidden technical debt.

That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.

The industry needs to deliver on a lot more than that to justify the investments that have been made.

[rescbr]

No need to be wealthy. Last December I paid $180 for an year of Z.ai's coding plan. It's enough for hobby use.

[consumer451]

> That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.

Isn't this exactly how many technologies get started?

A PC used to cost as much as a very nice used car, and had few practical uses cases, as one example.

[Gud]

I have developed multiple such applications myself. Essentially a wrapper around SQLite in pick your favourite language, that you then use to extract and combine different data.

[kjkjadksj]

I know right and after 6 months it is an app managing a database with some ocr functionality. 6 months for that? I get the wine guy couldn’t do this beforehand, but in the “old days” of say 6 years ago this is the sort of thing you might build after a 60 minute tutorial…

[bearjaws]

> It's a lot more that just a CRUD-app.

That still seems like a simple CRUD app.

[sunrunner]

Steady on, I'd say it's at least a fancy CRUD app.

[bradley13]

Yes, sure, a fancy CRUD app. Still, enabling a non-programmer to do this is... interesting, and ultimately may be game changing.

He didn't spend a fortune. This wasn't "agentic", eating zillions of tokens. It was the standard stuff anyone could do with a personal subscription ($20/month or so) to a couple of AI services.

[fnwbr]

what about the data? is it locally hosted? if he drops his phone everything will be lost? or are servers and databases involved? if so, where are they being hosted? how did he manage those?

even these sorts of stories are incredibly shallow and hard to believe for me personally.

[jwardbond]

I was just talking to a friend of mine who has been making webapps for himself in a similar fashion. Very little to no programming experience. His first app scans his course notes (med school) and creates structured question banks. He's released it so everyone at his school can sign up with their institutional email. The front end is hosted with vercel and the backend with supabase.

He also has one for tracking the stats of the volleyball team he coaches. He can do things like track the direction a player hits the balls during a game and save it for review later. Hosted with Vercel and Firebase I think.

Point being: he has no experience with software development before this (although he did have some data science experience), and in the space of a couple months has produced two high quality webapps that are being widely used in his circles.

I was pretty shocked, but after seeing the apps Claude made for him (or told him how to make). I can believe this story.

[hombre_fatal]

If someone has any curiosity, they can ask the AI about this and it will engineer a solution, like use iCloud or some free tier service.

After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today. It's hubris to think nobody else has the interest nor attention span to walk a solution incrementally to its conclusion, esp when they don't know what the final solution will look like ahead of time.

[cassianoleal]

> After all, it's basically how us software engineers arrived to where we are today

An increasingly smaller minority of us. The vast majority have gone through a bootcamp, or an undergrad or similar to gain specific skills that they can apply writing software for a corporation.

There's hardly any reason to believe the percentage of the general public that reach that level will be any higher than in the profession itself.

[dhdaadhd]

The stack is typically some combination of supabase and vercel (think: managed everything), which get you far enough on a free plan if you have 1 user

[notjustanymike]

You'd be shocked at how easy Supabase makes these things. You can describe your data needs and it'll use AI to generate the table and RLS policies. You can even go a step further and have Replit do both front and backend. I had chats with multiple PMs who have entire functioning products without understanding a lick of code. Powerful, and although scary from a security perspective, not so scary if it's a personal app.

[fragmede]

Supabase scans customer setups and throws up loud warnings for insecure setups aka RLS is disabled on $table, and unless the PM is totally irresponsible, they can throw that email at their LLM of choice and ask it "is this a problem, will I get hacked?" and the LLM will do a fairly competent review of the issue. So it's scary from a security perspective in so far as you do or don't trust AI to find issues.

[hypeatei]

I was writing a comment about the durability of this app, but you beat me to it. Something tells me that the burden of maintaining this thing through various OS updates, security policy changes (from Apple and Google), new devices, etc. is going to be frustrating for him. It's great that he vibecoded something useful to him in this moment, but I do think these stories are "counting their chickens before they hatch" so to speak.

[rebolek]

It's not like you can't write "update this for next round of forced obsolescence " to Claude. Yes, it's unnecessary burden but solvable.

[thisisit]

So the future is - Everyone has their own apps built specifically for their own use case and spending tokens just for the satisfaction to have created something themselves? That sounds like a tool for hobbyists.

I have no clue about wine connoisseur apps but I have to assume that someone some where has build apps to manage the obvious data and now integrating AI into it so that it can do photo to text and reports and summaries etc.

If there are no other apps then commercializing the app might be a better win and use case.

If there are others apps then I can't imagine the nightmare where everyone has their own Supabase/Firebase/AWS etc instances and run their private apps because it does things exactly as what they want to do along with satisfaction of spending 6 months on it. Instead of paying for an app which might be used across the industry and helped them save those 6 months.

[asielen]

Yeah, I think I agree with your assessment.

Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.

I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.

A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.

A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.

Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.

And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.

These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.

[bradley13]

I think you are too cynical. His app works. It needs no maintenance, unless the underlying OS changes something fundamental. It doesn't use AWS or any other cloud service.

Look, as an IT professional, I build dry stone walls. Could a professional do it better? Probably. So what? I have the satisfaction of having built them myself, exactly how I want.

AI had enabled something new, and us only going to get better.

[thisisit]

You are basically repeating what you said above. It works. There is satisfaction of building the app yourself. Its your baby and it works - AI enables that and it will get better.

Replace what you said with many hobbyist examples from over the years. Lets say hydroponic farming. "You can grow your own vegetables without needing soil and it works even if you live in the city. Farmers can do better but so what you grow the vegetables yourself. Hydroponic farming has created magic".

[eooekwe]

Much of this could be done with a spreadsheet.

Not exactly revolutionary in the way you’re claiming.

[poszlem]

Half of the current startups could be done with a speadsheet and yet they earn money.

[moregrist]

The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling.

It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, the data grows 10x and emailing spreadsheets back and forth becomes too error prone, or any other of the well-known ways that this falls apart.

Those of us in software always cringe and want to use a database.

“Vibe-coded apps are the new spreadsheet.” Seems about right, and the problems will be similar.

Edit: This comes across as more negative than I wanted. I think spreadsheet-driven businesses are pretty amazing, and it's a testament to the tool how far they can get. I pretty much feel that way about bespoke vibe-coded apps. I'd feel even better about it if the rhetoric wasn't mixed in with claiming software as a career is over or that no one will have jobs anymore.

[fragmede]

I want that to be true because it means I'll still have a job, but vibe coded apps by non-developers are still backed by git (as far as I've seen), addressing at least one issue with spreadsheets, and are hosted on Vercel, and backed by Supabase, so there's no sending files back and forth and the database (PostgreSQL) has backups and is able to scale somewhat. What are the other well-known ways that spreadsheets fall apart? If the person leaves, all the next person has to do when something breaks is to the LLM the problem and ask it to fix it. You couldn't do that with a spreadsheet.

[throwaway85825]

Institutional knowledge is just valued at $0.

[kristianbrigman]

UI/UX is important.

[smoghat]

Man, I wish he open sourced in on GitHub, I’d love to customize it for my own collection.

[datsci_est_2015]

So LLMs are the 3d printers of software. Great for niche use-cases without enough market demand for a proper solution, and generally scale very poorly vs proper industrial processes.

[basisword]

The big difference from 3D printers is that there is zero upfront investment required. The number of non-technical people I've seen making simple tools/scripts to automate bits of their workflow is astonishing. Costs them nothing to at least try it out.

[datsci_est_2015]

> The number of non-technical people I've seen making simple tools/scripts to automate bits of their workflow is astonishing.

The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is. Of the remaining who do, I would not be shocked that they’re capable of asking an LLM to produce one for them.

[basisword]

>> The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t even know what a tool or script is.

They don't need to know what it is. "Hey ChatGPT I have to check this report daily and update a spreadsheet with the latest changes, can you do it for me?"

[datsci_est_2015]

Can you come up with a better example? I ask ChatGPT your question verbatim:

> Hey ChatGPT I have to check this report daily and update a spreadsheet with the latest changes, can you do it for me?

And it recommends:

  - process automation using a script (I don’t know what that is)
  - parse the report (what’s parsing?)
  - update the spreadsheet automatically (cool, how?)
  - highlight differences (no I want it done automatically)

Obviously I want it done automatically, so I tell it it’s excel and its next response tells me to use “pip install pandas”. I close the browser and go back to work.

So yeah, trivial for you and me, but you can’t act like we’re in magic wizard territory.

[basisword]

Try not taking things so literally. Here's a better example: - Company has a Cursor project you can download and open in Cursor. - It's connected to all of the companies internal data sources. - Now business people (who would have previously had to make requests to the BI team) can query the databases in natural language. - They can tell Cursor to export the data as a CSV and they can open in their Spreadsheet tool. - They need that report every day. They can tell Cursor and it can suggest the best automated way to do that. Once they ok it, Cursor can write a script and run it daily. The csv file shows up in the persons Downloads folder every morning.

Aside from this, I've seen people with no coding background creating Chrome extensions to help them with things. I've seen them making little React Native apps without knowing what React Native is.

[swader999]

I think your last half remains to be determined.

[datsci_est_2015]

The preponderance of evidence to date would point to systems engineered by meatbags are of a significantly higher quality than vibe coded ones.

My use of the word “system” is very intentional vs. something less qualifying like “program”.

Edit to add: my take is proper system engineering and design basically requires general intelligence, so the bar for LLMs to reliably produce high quality systems is AGI.

[visarga]

It's no longer a choice. The AI is already causing changes in how competition, investors and users behave.

[datsci_est_2015]

This seems to be a non-sequitur, did you respond to the wrong comment? And investors are famously stupid on aggregate, so I wouldn’t trust their judgment in terms of predicting the future of systems engineering.

[PunchyHamster]

I don't think many people subscribe to photoshop for just occasional image edits. It's very much a tool mostly used by professionals that do a lot of it

[embedding-shape]

Back in the day when a license was expensive, then yes, you either were a professional who used it a lot, or like the rest of us poors, you used a cracked copy.

Nowadays though, with relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription, as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.

[visarga]

Because of that I never touched Photoshop in 25 years, since PS6 I think. I rarely need to edit images, and when I do I regret the app I once had. There's no free tier or something that makes sense for my needs. I use Gimp but its UI does not feel right.

[clearleaf]

I don't pay subs for things like photoshop. It doesn't matter if I can "afford" it. It could be one cent per year and still I just don't want stuff that's set up that way.

[embedding-shape]

Right, me neither, I avoid subscriptions like a plague.

But clearly you and I aren't the typical person here, considering the success of some SaaS, and considering the amount of money Adobe et al makes regardless of their choices. So hard to say they're "wrong" when the system and ecosystem effectively actively prize them for their choices, with their wallet.

[jaffa2]

> relatively cheap subscriptions (on a month-to-month basis at least), where the cheapest plan is like 20EUR/month or something, even if you just work part-time as some social media "take picture of food for restaurants to post on their social media after editing", you can easily afford a Photoshop subscription,

Sorry what? This is nonsense.

> as long as you have one or two gigs per month which more than covers the subscription already.

ahh there's the rub.

So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.

So what about the folk who don't use it professionally and have no access to cracked copies anymore ?

[leviathant]

I'm paying $16/mo for Photoshop and Lightroom.

I have to imagine that the majority of people who post to HN can afford $16/mo.

I'm not a professional photographer, but it's an excellent hobby, and just the other week, a neighbor stopped me to tell me how much they love the pictures I post to our neighborhood Facebook group - so that's something I guess!

[PunchyHamster]

For photos I just used RawTherapee, it's dedicated tool for photo processing and if you are just correcting, not editing it's probably better one too

[embedding-shape]

> Sorry what? This is nonsense.

Would you like to specify exactly what part is nonsense from that quoted part? Because it's what I saw myself first-hand when I owned a restaurant, so would be interesting to here what exactly of that you think is "nonsense"?

> So if you use photoshop professionally/commercially then you can afford to pay for it.

No, my point is that even if you're basically part-time "starting out"/"fresh", you most likely can afford it, which is different than a professional user who uses it every day.

Back in the day, it truly was "You can only afford Photoshop if you use it professionally every day" but today you can work as a waiter and have photography as a hobby, and still be able to afford it.

[jaffa2]

I read the para as saying $16 is so cheap, anyone can afford it! That is nonsense. Also subjective. Closer reading reveals the scenario is a restaurant having picture of its food taken. Presumably the restaurant is making money, and so can justify the expense of only $16. (or paying the photographer, who can then pay for the sub.)

Billy the 12 year old who wants to 'play with photoshop' now and again (as many of us did when we were younger back in the day) can't afford $16 a month for that.

> you're basically part-time "starting out"/"fresh", you most likely can afford it,

yes - you are agreeing with me.. 'starting out/fresh' refers to making money? i.e. professional use. A professional is merely someone who makes money. Frequency is irrelevant.

[Unicironic]

I absolutely agree with this. As someone that used to use Photoshop a lot when I was younger, But now just have a few niche use cases for it, I instead vibe-coded image editing for our blog posts exactly the way we need it. The I.e proper dimensions proper cropping, automatically generated. SEO friendly slug, etc. Sure, it's only about 1% of what Photoshop can do if that, but the reality is that unless you're a graphic designer, that's not what you need it for in your workflow anyways. AI allows you to just have a custom workflow without having to buy these massive tools that were built for a million use cases

[MattRogish]

Yes, absolutely.

People keep confusing single player vs. multiplayer and forgetting "jobs to be done".

Photoshop files are the lingua franca of the design world. If you're working with designers, they'll likely give you a PSD (replace PSD with other examples in other domains, etc.)

Sure, I could vibe code "make a tool that lets me create multi-layered canvasses etc." but if I want to use it with anyone other than me, I have to make sure that it's binary compatible, bit for bit, with PSDs (or whatever's required to open it in Photoshop and maintain the layers).

This makes no sense to do this unless I'm targeting Photoshop specifically and plenty of tools already do this.

Other than a way to burn money, I am completely unsurprised such a thing isn't widely available (I'm sure someone, somewhere is/has tried this).

For most people, single-player Photoshop is a means to an end. If I have sufficiently advanced AI I can just describe what I want and get the end result (a button, image, whatever). Or even just point it at an image and say "add gaussian blur here".

I would never try and vibe-code a new editor just to make images.

[giancarlostoro]

> Photoshop is a good example for that, actually. How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.

This is also probably why nobody is vibecoding photoshop, why bother when a model can do it?

[concinds]

Yeah, the pain/reward ratio is against vibecoded replacements for mature tools. Piracy is cheaper than tokens.

But over the next 5 years I expect a growth in Blender-like open-source projects aiming to take on the big closed-source elephants. Code is cheaper now. The main downside of LLM coding, unmaintainable spaghetti code, can be mitigated effectively with discipline and coordination.

You still need maintainers to uphold contribution standards, but people will throw tokens at you. A small, disciplined team can go a long way, make a decent enough product, and then attract the institutional money (like Blender did) and hit that growth curve where everyone rallies you and you've won.

Lots of companies would have a vested interest in reducing these dependencies to Adobe et al., or have a more customizable product. Competitive professional tools, more like Blender and less like GIMP, but in other areas, like DAWs, CADs, and others.

[maptime]

We saw this happening for our SAAS stack we used, why pay for a massive SAAS tool with a huge surface area when we only used the desk+room booking and payment. Before building something like this was such a huge cost now it's becoming palatable

[miltonlost]

> Previously you might use Excel to take raw data from various places and analyze it, create charts, reports, extract findings. Now you can have AI write a script to produce the exactly report you want from the original data

And often from data it makes up!

[haritha-j]

Background removal. that's the main thing i used photoshop for. Last week I noticed that there's an AI version now built into microsoft powerpoint. I have almost no use for photoshop now.

[submeta]

100%. This is what’s happening with agentic coding. We develop individual solutions tailored to our needs. We don’t need one-stop shops anymore.

For instance I have created a snippet manager, because I didn’t like the one in Raycast. Or I have created a journal viewer because the daily notes in Obsidian are not easily viewed across days. And so I have dozens of smaller solutions that are tailored to my needs. And I am guessing lots of vibe coders do the same.

[JKCalhoun]

That sounds correct to me. I vibe-coded an app that creates a stereo pair from .mpo files for viewing on an antique stereoscope [1]. Is there anything more niche than that?

[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer

[arscan]

Applications like Photoshop will one day be regarded as the castles of this era. Technically impressive, but economically/politically irrelevant. While they could be reproduced at a fraction of the cost there just isn’t any point to it because there are much better ways to allocate capital.

[pbalau]

Why do you need the AI to write a script? Why not have the AI do the work without a "script"?

[hilariously]

Because then you have chosen a non-deterministic action when a deterministic action would do, thus making it more expensive, more prone to failure, and just more annoying to use.

Would you rather press a button and go through a simple process that's normalized across all crud apps or talk to a chatbot every time you want to solve a problem and invoke external apis?

[zahlman]

Do keep in mind, the user has to be someone who can conceive of the idea of having a script instead of just having the job done, and also needs to have some semblance of understanding how to run it.

[ses1984]

A script will last forever, and doesn’t cost tokens to run.

[ben_w]

> How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop? I don't know if this is showing up in Adobe's subscription numbers, yet, but I expect it will eventually.

As per https://xkcd.com/1015/, I suspect many people are doing this and the artists hate all the examples even more than the average consumer who simply treats it as a sign of low-budget work.

My own experiments with ChatGPT's image system is that while I have some pictures I'm very happy with, I also have a surprisingly hard time getting it to follow direction, e.g. shadow direction being inconsistent between foreground and background, making anthropomorphic animals look like they were meant to be (more Elder Scrolls' Khajiit and less big-eyed cartoony fursuits) etc. Stable Diffusion is much easier to deal with in that regard, but then it can't do text and has a much higher frequency of body-horror.

Doing things right is expensive, and most people have no budget. But my guess is people without budget were probably the ones who previously downloaded random pictures off the internet and used them without checking: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/11/smith-family-p...

That or perhaps even use pirated versions of Photoshop.

[ACCount37]

The recent ChatGPT Images 2.0 has awe-inspiring image editing and composition capabilities. I can totally see what people mean when they say "Photoshop killer".

[vunderba]

Yup. You still have to do some manual work if you want to create something like a comic and make sure each panel is internally consistent with the world. Heck, even OpenAI’s own cookbook demonstration of the dog comic was a complete mess. I ended up having to make a lot of manual edits just to fix it.

I also think most people fall into the Fiverr camp: they need something that’s “good enough,” and don't have a particularly critical eye for detail - in which case even one-shotting with the latest models, gpt-image-2 or nb2 can get you there.

[koonsolo]

Same experience on my end. It's crazy what the latest version can pull off, with reference images, text, etc.

[rimliu]

so both of you do not understand what Photoshop is really used for.

[ACCount37]

Do you? I somehow doubt it.

Can you provide an example of something "Photoshop is really used for" that ChatGPT Images 2.0 is completely incapable of doing?

[arm32]

- Keeping a human face exactly the same while removing imperfections and being able to make small, purely non-destructive edits in series.

- Export in very high quality without estimative upscaling.

[koonsolo]

I used to hire people to do photoshop for me. So yes, I kind of get the idea.

I don't hire them anymore. Can you guess why?

[fragmede]

So tell us instead of being vague And condescending?

[beej71]

I think there's some low-hanging money to be made with a nearly-feature-complete PS clone.

[fragmede]

Where's the market for that though? You're trying to capture the crowd for whom Photoshop via creative cloud is too expensive, so you have to charge less than that, but there's already a couple of open source programs that do some amount of image editing for free, so you'd have to be really near feature complete for your PS clone, which is a lot of tokens that could be used to fork those open source programs and make them better, rather than start from scratch.

[beej71]

I think if a good PS clone existed, Adobe wouldn't be selling so many subs. And yeah, undercut the hell out of it... How much does it cost in tokens to make the replacement?

[fragmede]

Give Claude the goal of taking Gimp but make it more usable, and change the name.

[kjkjadksj]

Your competition, gimp, is free already.

[beej71]

The last time I was touching the PS world, everyone would laugh you out of the room for saying "GIMP". I had to pay for PS just so I could export art to use it in GIMP.

[bensyverson]

Not to mention Photopea [0]

  [0]: https://www.photopea.com

[doubled112]

The Affinity suite is also free now

https://www.affinity.studio/

[sreekanth850]

Those were never the users of photoshp. I guess canva will get a big hit due to this.

[m463]

Yeah, you can use some ai models to completely reinterpret your photos with different styles, or just skip the "having your photos" as a source in the first place and generate them synthetically.

[visarga]

> How many people are just using ChatGPT or Gemini to get the image edits they want instead of reaching for Photoshop?

Lately ChatGPT can generate complex diagrams with lots of text so I used them to make slides.

[rimliu]

Photoshop is a wrong tool for diagrams.

[sitkack]

So it is the AI image workbench tools like ComfyUI.

[altmanaltman]

I don't think you understand Photoshop and its business if you think people are replacing it with ChatGPT or Gemini... the point of the article is that the whole "SaaS is dead and AI killed it" media narrative is bs propelled by the ai hype cycle.

[__alexs]

Photoshop (and many traditional SaaS products) solve hundreds of different use cases. Most users probably only care about a handful of them. You don't need to do every use case to kill SaaS if you have a tool that can allow users to solve their 2-3 use cases on their own with custom tooling.

[decimalenough]

That's only half the author's point. The other half is that the "gate is where it always was" (= the part that's not just grinding out code to spec), and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.

[ben_w]

Indeed. But:

> the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.

I don't even think this "can't" is even a fact at this point.

24 years ago, my first major academic project, I wrote myself an image editor. In Visual Basic, because the teacher required it, and without version control because I hadn't heard of that when I was 18. It wasn't Photoshop, more like PaintShop Pro without the plugin support and instead with a bunch of baked-in effects, but the experience (and a later attempt to make it into a useful product) showed me how easy it was to separate concerns in that kind of app*, so I think it would be possible if anyone actually cared to try it.

* for each document, you have a fairly simple data structure in the form of an array of layers/groups, each layer has masks etc., but mostly you're building out a huge number of other functions on that data; the hard parts are performance, which AI can also optimise; and that some of these (e.g. smart selection, content aware fill) need some kind of AI to be any good, which again AI can also now create the training system for.

Even re-implementing a JPEG codec from scratch in a stupid language for the task wasn't too painful for me while I was still a university student, and I only did that because my REALBasic-on-a-PPC-mac setup at the time didn't allow me to use libjpeg like a sensible person.

Of course, Adobe also has Creative Cloud and a search engine over stock photography, both of which are essentially entire projects in their own right, and I'd assume also integration with all their other apps.

Proper vector fonts were also out of my scope; that and full backwards compatibility with PSD format, undocumented warts and all, would be my only real question for a vibe-coding attempt.

[hilariously]

I think its also possible, but non-technical people likely wont hill climb high enough to make this unless they are extremely motivated. Using abstraction properly to effect change, understanding breaking down the problem to extreme details and building them back up one by one. I think most of the people using AI for one shot type of things don't even know what "content aware fill" is even if they used it.

[altmanaltman]

Most vibecoders say their stack is "cursor". Reread your comment and then try to guess if a vibecoder could even understand what you talked about let alone execute it in a pefect and reliable manner. Vibecoding is about dopamine hits, people give up if it doesn't work on first 2-3 attempts.

[le-mark]

> and the fact that you can't vibecode a Photoshop doesn't mean AI is useless.

A lot of ai hype IS premised on ai being able to vibecode photoshop.

[signatoremo]

I never heard of it, let alone "a lot". Care to give examples?

[augment_me]

And the point of the comment you are answering is that the market you are talking about has taken on a different form.

The difference is that normally, people would perhaps pay a company to buy a PS license, or pay a professional to edit their images, however now this market segment will just use VLMs to edit the image to what they need.

[vidarh]

It goes beyond that. It's becoming cheaper and easier to e.g. vibecode tools to carry out the handful of uses lower end users may have for PS. Some users will do that directly. Some users will turn that into services or apps. PS will be weakened by thousands of small cuts, not one large vibecoded abomination.

Some of those tools will use VLMs to provide more advanced features instead of implementing it themselves, making competing for a broader subset of users feasible.

[netdevphoenix]

What is "VLM"?

[famouswaffles]

Vision Language Models

[ses1984]

Very large models that aren’t large language models.

[carlosjobim]

1. Adobe sells Photoshop to design professionals.

2. Design professionals sell their work to businesses.

But if businesses start using AI image editing instead of contracting professionals, then Adobe won't have a market of Photoshop buyers.

Before you say that AI isn't good enough for the kind of business which pays for professional design, in one year it probably will be.

[altmanaltman]

Its not about AI being good enough. Businesses outsource these things because they don't want to deal with it. That's the same now. The question is if designers are using AI or not. And guess who has the best AI stack for designers? Photoshop with Firefly.

This is why I insuniated that people here don't really understand photoshop as a business and customer, only see it as an app.

And yeah, it will be better in one year but so will Adobe's inbuilt AI tools.

We have not seen designers abandon Adobe for AI and i am willing to bet that wont be true, not even in this decade.

[carlosjobim]

You're making really good points.

[sillyfluke]

This is such a bizarre misrepresentation of the author's point that I have to assume in good faith that it's based on a misreading of the post. Otherwise, you are unintentionally proving the author's point by describing (now) trivial uses of AI as some sort of counterpoint, or simply making an unrelated point that doesn't have anything to do with the author's main argument.

The author's point is not specifically about Photoshop. It's right there in the second paragraph:

>Where is the vibecoded Photoshop. The vibecoded Excel. The vibecoded Maya. The vibecoded Blender. The vibecoded compiler that compiles itself. The vibecoded database, the vibecoded OS, the vibecoded anything-that-requires-architectural-judgment-to-hold-together

What do all these examples have in common, besides requiring "architectural judgment-to-hold-together"?

They are software created by mid-large companies or organizations with a large of numbers of contributors. It's not about Photoshop, it's about developing complex software with high quality control and a continuous mature and continuous release cycle to a demanding set of hundreds/thousands of users. So to take that it in and then say, "Well, I don't think AI going to be used fo build that stuff, it's going to be directly used by non-technical end users to bypass existing more complex legacy software like Excel," is only proving the author's point.

Cause at the end of the day, what are all these companies "token-maxxing" actually building and selling to their customers? That's the larger point the author is making. Just as you imply, a large swath of apps and SaaS are being wiped out by end-users directly using AI. So the only viable path is to raise the bar on what is being built. Someone should be vibecodinfg a phone OS and vibe-building an actual phone alternative to Android and iOS, if it's actually possible. Someone should be vibecoding the Metaverse and vibecoding hundreds of Apple Vision Pro apps to make VR/AR actually viable (again). And on and on.

The only honest counterpoint to the author's post, unless you can cite vibecoded software at the level of scale and maturity they are seeking, should be:

Yeah, 2026 was the year the coding performance of LLMs passed a certain maturity threshold adoption-wise so we should realistically give it a few more years to see if it is actually possible to vibecode continuously released ambitious complex software used by demanding users on the scale you mention.