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by anticorporate 33 days ago
That's a bit like asking "Where are the vibecoded AWSs?" or "Where are the vibe coded Office 365s?"

Can I vibe code an image editor? Sure! I have, actually, just more as a curiosity. I got as far as a simple Canva replacement, and if that's what you need, maybe the question isn't can you vibe code Photoshop but rather can you vibe code Canva.

Photoshop is part of a gigantic ecosystem of tools, formats, and plugins that happens to have an image editor. More to the point, I've got an employee who has been using the Adobe ecosystem for decades, dating all the way back to the tools acquisition by Adobe. We have files that started as Pagemaker layouts in the 90s that are still in use. Could any given piece of new work be done in, say, GIMP? Of course! Does that get me out of my Adobe subscription for working with legacy files and having a Swiss Army knife for anything that might come along? Unfortunately, no.
2 comments
alwillis 33 days ago
If I wanted to vibe code something like Photoshop, I would start with the source code for version 1.0 [1].

It’s written mostly in very readable Pascal with some 68000 assembly.

For those not familiar (or not old as me), Pascal was popular in 80s. The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like.

LLMs are good at converting programming languages; it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to convert it to Swift, Rust, etc.

[1]: https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...

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anticorporate 29 days ago
Thanks for linking this. My first "serious" program was an image editor I wrote in Turbo Pascal (and a little x86 assembly) in my high school computer science class. Of course, it was supposed to be an image editor for the game I was sure I was going to write for my final class project, but nobody was teaching kids how to realistically scope things.
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FailMore 33 days ago
I've been experimenting with a fairly vibecoded Office 365..., but rooted in the world of vibe (an advanced Markdown reader which can do complex things like render charts and mermaid diagrams, see: https://sdocs.dev, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=charts, https://sdocs.dev/#sec=diagrams). Slides coming soon too... But this is very much a subsection of the full Office suite.

(Also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633)

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