If the authors used the same method to improve GIMP, they'd be introducing a bunch of slop code to GIMP. This code is not going to be of GIMP quality.

I also doubt this will hold a candle to GIMP for the aforementioned reasons. It might appeal to a small audience, but I do not expect it to dethrone GIMP any time soon.

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

To be honest, I think these things will be abandoned very quickly. Therefore I don't think that there will be any competition to the "flagship" FOSS projects anytime soon. However, in the proprietary world, it's money above all else, and I think that we're going to see the quality of proprietary software degrade very quickly. Because why pay engineers to do work if you can have a text generator that does it cheaper and gets there 80% of the way, and then just release it.

Not really a clean room implementation. Source has been leaked. Plus GIMP and other FOSS tools that implement the same functionality are in the training data. Very likely this "clean room" implementation is just laundering code.

It's an interesting exercise. If agentic AI is capable of easily recreating commercial software, I wonder if that'll make some software companies change their stance on it.

Not interested at all in using it though. I'm sure it'll be buggy as hell and I much prefer using software developed with actual care and purpose.

Arguing such thing is "open source" is misleading as 1/ contributors can hardly call themselves "authors" of this code 2/ nobody can demonstrate that the plagiarizing engine they used did not plagiarize proprietary source code or source code published under an incompatible license.

as in "you cannot claim a room is clean if you have never been in it, haven't built it, and cannot even know what's in it"

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.

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 don't know how anything developed by an LLM can be considered a cleanroom reimplementation. The AI has almost certainly seen the source code of the project it's reimplementing, even of it's proprietary because the developers of said software are likely using the AI too

the room can be spotless, but if your reagents are all tainted you'll only ever get slop plagiarized from other projects. but sure, enjoy your "clean room re-implementation of Photoshop" XD

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.

To me this is on the list of acceptable uses of AI: to fuck over asshole corporations.

It would be okay, if it wasn't Ai. I think using LLMs cannot be guaranteed to be a clean room implementation.

I will be extremely surprised if this comes anywhere near gimp. AI is not at the stage were is can create amazing software all by itself. It will likely be buggy and/or feature incomplete.

What effort? Having an LLM churning on a problem isn’t effort.

I'll just keep using GIMP, thanks

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.

But also fuck Adobe

It's AI slop. It's not worth a discussion.

Use Krita or 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

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."

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.

It's funny to see corpos get mad but honestly a project this big, spun up this quickly is almost certainly an unmaintainable mess.

My concerns for LLMs, despite numerous, do not outweight my hatred for Adobe.

Just more bullshit hype. This project will go nowhere.

AI slop.

I find clean room implementations to theoretically be cool, but there's a big area for bugs because they're based on feature parity, to my understanding. I would love for a 1:1 recreation of software like Photoshop, but unless there's something that can also be done to iron over bugs, I doubt the implementation would be good.

Do they even say which version of Photoshop they're mimicking?

It is built by AI agents, for AI agents. I guess it's interesting seeing software built from the ground up with hooks built in for every single action to be controlled by an AI agent, in that sense you could direct your own AI agent to use this to create/edit images. But even then I wouldn't trust this thing to edit and save over existing images, it is way too new and will have plenty of non-obvious bugs that would get embedded in every image you save.

And like most vibe coded AI projects this one will probably cease being maintained long-term.

If you're actually going to work with images you plan to keep long term just stick to GIMP, Krita, etc.

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...

anything to avoid having to use Gimp, moth supposes. moth has been using Gimp since moth was a larva, and it's always been one of the worst experiences in open source software.

AGENTS.md in the repo, btw.

AI slop that’s been developed in a mere 4 days (?)

I have been working on a project, with AI, for 4 months. When I see something done in 4 days that is supposed to be a large package, even more complex than what I am working on, I tend to be very wary about the quality.

how can you describe it as a clean room implementation when it was made with LLMs?

jfc is that a thing now, people just ignoring the enormous theft that's wrapped up in LLMs and calling it clean?

I despise adobe, and considering their pivot to ai slop this is ironic - but not something I'd ever install.

We already HAVE open source Photoshop clones. Quite a lot of them, actually. Have had them for decades.

There's two types of people who use Photoshop. A: the ones who pay for it because they WANT to, because it gets them things like enterprise support. B: pirates who don't give a shit about all the valid open source alternatives that ALREADY exist. Neither are going to start using this, even if it WASN'T defective slop.

My opinion: this is pointless

LLMs are stochastic regurgitators, but software can already be copy/pasted without cost.

Why should we be interested in an LLM clone of photoshop when there are already clones of photoshop (e.g. https://photopea.com/)?

If I want to use photoshop (or something like it), then I'll use photoshop (or something like it: i.e. photopea).

There's literally no point in favour of using the LLM copy, it's going to have less support and less security (since its training data will have also included prompt injection attacks).

It's just more of the same, but worse. Even for the sake of argument: if it wasn't worse, it'd still be more of the same.

I'm not interested in more of the same, I'm interested in things made by people that push the boundaries of what's possible: (e.g. graphite).

Whatever kills Adobe...

i hate adobe, but also color science is hard. Can we say whether this would affect the actual color values recorded on sensors or film, even in subtle ways? what if the color matters for historical or scientific or medical purposes?

At a minumum it terrifies monopolies like Adobe.

People on Reddit reportedly tried it and it doesn't work properly it seems

No idea how this works, sounds insane

I would personally prefer getting the few extra additions like automatic object detection into GIMP, or better PDF editing support for Libreoffice draw etc and use that

"story told by photo craft"

Cool, now do Lightroom too.

This kind of feels like Nintendo vs. Pocketpair all over again... It's a "written from scratch" situation so Adobe might struggle to get them there but they also have a ton of patents covering every inch of their catalogue. I think this one is going to get really messy because unlike Nintendo this is potentially existential for Adobe.

How does vibe-coding an app equate to a clean-room implementation?