IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Theme 1: Technical performance and scalability concerns
Many commenters doubted whether AI‑generated clones could match Photoshop’s efficiency, especially for high‑resolution work and brush engines.
- “The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K × 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera.” – voidUpdate
- “A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine … works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job.” – minimaxir

Theme 2: Economic justification and impact on Adobe’s model
The discussion centered on whether spending a few thousand dollars on AI tokens to create a free clone made sense compared to Adobe’s subscription model.
- “They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.” – HelloNurse
- “Very smart economics, because they do it once and get to have it forever, for free, for everyone. It’s charity.” – sznio

Theme 3: Toxic discourse and ad hominem attacks
A significant portion of the thread criticized the article’s inflammatory claims—such as accusing vibe coders of pedophilia—detracting from substantive debate.
- “One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do).” – HelloNurse
- “Arguing your enemies are pedos and you're good guys that deserve all the gratitude in the world is not a great way to make an argument.” – altmanaltman

🚀 Project Ideas

Generating project ideas…

HyperBrush

Summary

  • A high‑performance brush rendering library optimized for megapixel canvases, undo history, and layer compositing.
  • Provides SDF‑based stroke generation with GPU acceleration, eliminating the lag seen in many vibe‑coded clones.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Developers building image editors, vibe‑coded clone creators, open‑source projects like GIMP/Krita
Core Feature GPU‑accelerated brush engine with SDF strokes, support for canvases ≥100 MP, pressure sensitivity, undo/redo
Tech Stack Rust + wgpu/WebGPU (optional C++/Vulkan backend)
Difficulty Medium‑High
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Commenters noted brush performance as a key pain point: “The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels” (voidUpdate) and “If a brush engine … works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning” (InsideOutSanta).
  • HyperBrush gives those builders a ready‑made, battle‑tested core so they can focus on UI/features rather than low‑level rendering, addressing the frustration that “vibe coded apps … are … two or three years old” in human hours.

VibeForge

Summary

  • An AI‑assisted scaffolding tool that generates minimal, feature‑specific Photoshop clones based on user‑defined requirements, automatically integrates HyperBrush for performance, and runs built‑in benchmarks.
  • Core value: reduces wasted effort on unnecessary features, guarantees a performance baseline, and lets vibe‑coders build exactly what they need.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Indie developers, hobbyists, vibe‑coders wanting lightweight editors for specific workflows
Core Feature LLM‑driven code generation (Claude/Ollama) that outputs a ready‑to‑build project with configurable feature set, includes HyperBrush, and generates performance tests
Tech Stack Python backend, LLM API (Claude/OpenAI), Jinja templating, optional WASM preview
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Hobby

Notes

  • Users praised the idea of building only what you need: “You can build and maintain a version that only has the features you need, with a ~20$ subscription of any of the good AI coding harnesses” (fooker).
  • VibeForge directly serves that desire, letting HN commenters spin up a performant, tailored editor in a weekend without reinventing the brush engine, addressing the comment that “tell the LLM to focus on brush performance and let it run for a few hours” (InsideOutSanta).

CloneGuard

Summary

  • An automated compliance and security scanning service for AI‑generated codebases, detecting potential copyright infringement, license violations, and security vulnerabilities specific to software clones.
  • Core value: helps vibe‑coders avoid legal trouble and improve code quality before release.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Vibe‑coder teams, open‑source maintainers, companies concerned about IP risk from AI‑generated clones
Core Feature Scans code for similarities to known proprietary codebases (embeddings), checks licenses, runs SAST (Semgrep/CodeQL) for security, provides remediation suggestions
Tech Stack Python, FAISS vector embeddings, Semgrep/CodeQL, LLM for explanations
Difficulty Medium‑High
Monetization Revenue-ready: $10 per scan (or $50/mo unlimited)

Notes

  • Commenters highlighted security testing challenges: “Security testing has still some challenges, as most public cloud models don't do it well” (nicce).
  • IP concerns were raised repeatedly: “The entire reason you're seeing a lot of more ambitious reverse‑engineering/decomp projects … is due to Claude Opus 5.5” (minimaxir) and legal threats around cloned mods (Onavo).
  • CloneGuard would give HN users confidence to share their AI‑generated projects without fear of takedowns, encouraging responsible innovation while still enjoying the speed benefits of vibe‑coding.

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