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.
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.
I’m interested in where it goes in regards to legal drama. It can’t be used to improve gimp or anything else really though. I don’t think it actually meets the definition of clean room which would cause issues if anyone sought legal action, and many foss projects don’t take AI contributions at all anyway.
On one hand, fuck adobe, use gimp. On the other, fuck Ai slop, use gimp.
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 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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
It’s funny to see corpos get mad but honestly a project this big, spun up this quickly is almost certainly an unmaintainable mess.
Looking at the PR’s & git activity & the interest in this whole project, I doubt LLM powered humans couldn’t keep this running if nothing unexpected -like a lawsuit- happens.
My personal experience with LLMs is that they are very good for adapting existing code to newer libraries & various other changes.
Interesting idea that probably does not deliver. Looks like their funding model is in-app AI gen in the cloud that you buy credits for. I’m always looking for an Illustrator alternative but have yet to find one. Lots of good vector drawing apps but Illustrator is so much more than that…
The app icons look like the the prompt was: draw [random animal] in style of O’REILLY programming book covers…
Utterly doomed licensing. I mean rule #1 of a clean-room reimplementation is to not openly admit you’re ripping off another product.
Secondly, as others have said, “AI did it” is not a clean room. Otherwise I can make the next pokemon game and just say that I got AI to reinvent the word pokemon and to generate all the pictures of pikachu therefore I’m good.
Thirdly, the amount of horrible AI verbiage makes the documentation alone awful to read, I have no temptation to try this.
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.
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 really funny going back and forth between lemmy and HN to compare the reactions
It’s AI slop. It’s not worth a discussion.
Use Krita or Gimp.
