Never got to try out PhotoSuite, looks like it really was just ripping-off your code, the repo owner already deleted it, and now it forks PhotoCraft.

I have a huge respect for your work on Photopea, been using it constantly since the time I completely moved to Linux a year ago. It has the best Photoshop parity yet to find! Would you ever consider to: 1. Open sourcing your work (partially or completely) under some kind of a permissive/copyleft license. 2. Rewriting some parts of the website that require performance as WASM targets. 3. Using any modern JS frameworks, e.g. Svelte.

Hey, thanks for photopea. I use it frequently.

Can you settle an argument, perchance? Is it pronounced "Photo-P" or "Photo-pia" (as in "utopia")?

Photopea is a great tool. I am sorry about the ripoff by PhotoSuite.

Hey, huge fan and user of photopea. You are not far behind the VLC guy, u/jbk in my personal world view :)

If I may ask, if you were to do this all over again in 2024 - 2026, would you choose SSR?

I remember using your tool a lot for years but in the past year or so the ads have made it unusable. It feels more like browsing ign.com with no adblock or something. Just brutally slow and intrusive visually speaking.

I predicted something a few years ago that I still believe will come true: in time, you won't search YouTube for an existing, pre-recorded video that solves your itch, instead you'll describe a problem and a video will be generated in real-time, on the spot that meets your needs. This video will (legally, with consent) use the faces and voices of "YouTubers" (humans who have signed up their personality) to communicate with you. If you don't have subscriptions or the system wants to show you new "creators", then it'll still do what it does today plus generate new personalities that fit your profile - gay/heterosexual, male/female, 20-25 years old, etc.

The same applies to software: you'll describe a problem and a network of agents will write a solution faster than you can Google it, download it, install it, and start using it. It'll work with your accessibility requirements out of the box; it's UI will be in your language; the data will be stored where ever you like; and so on.

Plus, most people don't use 90% of Photoshop. How does the saying go? "The average user only uses 10% of a software's features, but every user uses a different 10%."

Now, you can just prompt the 10% you need and not even have to use up your computer's resources with the rest of Photoshop. I didn't like a single one of the many Android TV video player apps. Most of them were way too big, had all kinds of features I didn't need, took a while to launch, had stupid "libraries" that you had to populate your videos into, and relied on third party lookup services to get things like movie posters and other metadata. Pre-2020 I would have just picked the least bad one and lived with it. Now, I just vibe-slopped a player app with only the features I want and nothing else.

I agree, this is the right direction to be thinking in. I’ve made a bunch of tools for myself with AI, been interested to see if I could release it, and found 10 open source projects that do some flavor of what I made, but with zero traction. I feel like the unlimited personalization of these types of apps is what’s going to prevent there from being “the free photoshop”, I think that everyone will just have their own personalized vibecoded photoshop that does exactly what they need.

I think the second order effect is that games and software become cloud only where you just get a video stream of the software so decomps can't rip it apart and rewrite in rust. Or that copyright law will make 1:1 replicas of software illegal even if the code has been AI transformed.

Will all these platforms just disappear? I think that the real winners will adapt to this new AI world, evolving their platforms around agent-based workflows. Those who won’t will be just left behind (sadly)

That kinda depends on another manufacturer making a laptop with MacBook-level: battery life, screen, touchpad.

Which is apparently impossible.

People are already vibe-coding some of my extremely niche open source projects onto other platforms.

You can view it as a problem, or a point on a trend line where building software becomes ever easier and cheaper. If you follow that trend far enough, when you need for something Photoshop-shaped, you ask for it, and you get exactly the functionality you need. If you need it to do something PS doesn't, that capability just appears.

I've said it in other venues, but we're reaching a point where using someone else's software is like chewing someone else's gum.

Yes. None of these developers are seemingly as interested in the project as they are in the fiefdom. It’s a widespread problem in AI-driven development.

For me, I dont like photoshop and only have it to get lightroom so I can do basic editing on photos. I am in photoshop maybe 6 hours a year and only to do some minor edits or things I should probably do in another app like InDesign or whatever it is for layouts (I truly have no idea, but I'm not giving adobe more money).

For me, I just want to easily organize some folders, cull stuff, throw the culls into a marked directory, and process them to JPEG with some lighting adjustments since I shoot raw. Lightroom honestly is painful to use. I don't think gimp fills my needs since its more like photoshop. I'm happy to look at something else though!

Nobody really needs a perfect Photoshop clone, they need an image editor for their particular workflow. Photoshop excels, in a way, because it handle almost every potential workflow -- one product for many users.

But if I'm vibe-coding an app for myself, I only want it to what I want it to do. One product for one user.

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All the failures and faults become training data. Even this conversation. Training data. It will “just work” eventually, or OpenAI will host vibe coded projects that are “ready to use” in a few seconds. Like a GitHub or docker registry where the admins are all LLMs satisfying the world’s software requirements.

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Photopea is one of the clones discussed in the article…

Longing to see this future, it's so beautiful I guess ;)

and why do you think it's safe in the cloud / in a TPM?

It's easy for me to imagine a world where this stays the same.

I don't imagine that many of their customers are fans of taking unnecessary risks to save what isn't much money for most of them.

$260 / 12 = $21.67/month. Any person using Photoshop professionally will have no problems justifying that expense. Even if paying for the full suite, the cost will just be claimed as an expense and used as a deduction. One paying job will cover the fee while ensuring they are able to deliver a compatible file. The PSD file is a dumpster fire of a format with who knows how many footguns hidden within making compatibility a nightmare.

As a professional, there's no way I'd risk not using the real code. As a hobbyist, I can/have use something like Photopea.

Are you still doing Development on this?

I like to make fun of Excel as much as the next guy and I realize my use of tabular data is very limited compared to the full abilities within the app, but what in the world in Excel needs to be rendered at 240fps?

No screenshots to see what it looks like that I was able to find?

Their definition of vibe-coded is that it was built in 2026.

What adobe has done with their software suite is annoying as hell, but I was there in the late eighties, and there was simply nothing like Photoshop; it was a revelation. And continued to be for the next decade.

The throne was 100% earned. I would love to see Adobe dethroned now, but it definitely earned it in the first place.

Adobe's unearned throne? Monopoly? There's much to criticize with Adobe but what makes you say these specific things? They made the best software for their specific field and have been reaping the rewards for a long time. I feel like that throne is(was?) pretty earned.

And how are they in a monopoly position? Is this about proprietary formats or something else? Genuinely interested to know about this if it wasn't just hyperbole.

> Honestly, if this topples Adobe from its unearned throne then fantastic.

Why is their throne unearned? They created and continue to maintain their software, which is, as you said, still considered the gold standard.