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Also notably for the uninitiated: this is nothing more than the number of bugs submitted that haven't been closed. So this includes things like "bug: I can't figure out how to download it" or "bug: it won't work on my iPad" and long term items like "bug: this item needs reworked to eliminate a handful of obscure performance issues" as well as extremely low priority items like "bug: app crashes if the date is set 10 years in the past and the users username is over 100 characters". So all that combined only adding up to 144 is pretty good
To the average person it sounds like 144 things that will make my computer blow up and give kim jung un access directly to my bank account if I install it in reality most of even those 144 are things that like slight errors in certain tasks that are 99.5% unnoticeable to most.
The amount of times I just silently catch the error to suppress it because idk everything seems to work fine and I can't fucking figure out how to fix it...
Especially on a project that's gone semi-viral, hundreds of those issues are probably ridiculous feature requests or people who've done zero troubleshooting demanding help for their extremely easy to fix problem.
If enough people care for it to spend time (or token) to improve it. I also wouldn't be surprised if this project was dead in a month from now. Open source alternatives to Adobe software isn't exactly a new concept.
> Open source alternatives to Adobe software isn't exactly a new concept.
True but we haven't really had as much of an equalizer to big companies as we do now.
But whoever is the UX director for GIMP should be fired. I don't care of they're an organization of open source programmers, what they have done should be considered crimes against humanity.
GIMP and Blender (before 2.8) are honestly some of the most atroxious things I've seen regarding UX.. and I've even used a lot of Japanese software.
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u/C65007950X3D | 4090 | 32GB DDR5-6000 28-35-35-591d agoedited 1d ago
The UI thing is so important, yet a lot of open projects suffer from this.
There's also SolidCraft on Github now, it's a few days old and a decomp/rebuild of Fusion360.
Not the same devs, but the same concept.
Of course it's extremely new and a lot of stuff isn't working yet, but it's already more useable than FreeCAD ever was in 20(?) years of development because it's UI is so shit.
China is way ahead of us on this. ZWCAD is literally a clone of Autocad and offers a perpetual license. They have their own version of Revit I haven't messed with.
Big true. I've been using it since 2.78 (i bit the bullet and learned the old UI), and then once I finally got used to it, as much as someone can, they put out 2.8 😂
I wanted to blow my brains out. But EEVEE came out a few version later and it's been the goat since.
Yes, oh my god this was such a colossal upgrade. I was using it in uni when the switch happened and I basically went from on-par g industry standard to way better than Max/Maya overnight
Amazing. Mine was a complete legend, his response was essentially "I don't know blender but it's all the same concepts. If you can find the button I can teach you the concept and add long as I can open your files to fade it you can use whatever you want"
UI Design is a skillset that not a lot of technical engineers possess. Times have probably changed a lot now, but I've worked with a number of software engineers that were pretty dismissive of GUI as a concept entirely - and worked almost entirely in command line.
True but we haven't really had as much of an equalizer to big companies as we do now.
Surely Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are big companies too, profiting off the lazy dopamine hits of false productivity. The project will die, as most FOSS do, because no one wants to spend their time (or money) on it. I don't understand why people are ready to stroke off a huge company just because they hate a different large company. I've been a FOSS dev, it's arguably worse now than ever with project abandonment.
Also, Affinity exists, and it's nearly perfect for most people, even professionally. It's backed by a real company with real motivation to compete. I mean, it's not a 1:1 ripoff of Adobe products, so your muscle memory won't be the same, but it's great. I bought the lifetime license for all 3 software they sell for $160. That's less than the early cancellation fees of Adobe Cloud.
But whoever is the UX director for GIMP should be fired.
What's really sad is that GIMP wasn't originally purely a photo editing software, it was as GUI demo of GTK, the UI library it is based on... that's the extra crazy part
My question is, will the energy to maintain and improve it stick with the FOSS goal or will we eventually start seeing what we see with like 75% of these "disruptors" where they just start charging for it? Like the Plex/JF frontend landscape.
So much of this feels like a bait'n'switch for a GRQ scheme for a lot of people, and the rest don't seem to understand "move fast, break shit" isn't the entire message, just the first part.
Brother people charge for AI translated manga now. People will absolutely charge for it. Leave it free for 6 months to get a user base, then rug pull them and start charging. If even 10% of their users pay, they've got a good monthly income. Its a very common method these days.
Things will get interesting when one of these companies goes legal and sues a decomp project. The precedent set by that case will be foundational for the future of AI and IP rights.
Things will get interesting when one of these companies goes legal and sues a decomp project. The precedent set by that case will be foundational for the future of AI and IP rights.
Things will get interesting when one of these companies goes legal and sues a decomp project. The precedent set by that case will be foundational for the future of AI and IP rights.
Very very curious how this goes.
It feels like the courts have so far given AI companies the right to do whatever the fuck they want. I'm curious if we'll finally see some reigning in by the court if one of these ever goes to trial.
There's no momentum, you can't have momentum after a couple weeks, that's not how it works. A few weeks in, you're still solidly in the "interesting new project" honeymoon phase. You've gotta hit at least 6-12 months in before you have "momentum".
Some programming subs on Reddit actually enforce a minimum project age for posts to weed out devs who don't even care about what they're building. Ends up catching a lot of the "AI powered startup" slops
It's just too much AI generated code, very few people will actually be able to grow familiar with codebases like these at all as AI has a tendency to rewrite everything constantly. Every fix will create another bug.
AI code is nifty, but there's a point where it gets too far, especially with a large pool of collaborators. There's a reason Anthropic had to create their own version control, commits are massive and it seems pretty likely that the entire codebase practically ends up refactored daily with how many PRs they cite...
It's not too much 'ai generated ' code - it's simply too much code created by a guy who admitted he has no impetus to make it actually work. Be is just cloning app after app for notoriety, not to get actual useful software into people's hands.
“AI has a tendency to rewrite everything constantly”
I use Claude Code daily. I don’t find this to be true with any of the models released in 2026. We also spend a decent amount of time working on architecture documents, API contracts, etc at the beginning.
I also have Claude routines setup to run nightly to find code that has drifted from its documented behavior, finds duplicated or nearly duplicated code, etc. and then open targeted pull requests that can be reviewed by a human in 30 minutes or less (these ones always get human reviews because they’re not directed by a human).
I can tell you where any feature lives in the code base because the code structure still makes sense even after almost all our code written in the last 16+ months was done by Claude.
But there is a huge difference between developers carefully using LLMs to generate code, reviewing and “owning” each change, and a group of people blindly prompting to add features and fix stuff. That’s where the codebase can easily balloon to millions of lines of code, even using Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5
Nah, it's DOA. And I'm not even an AI hater. The problem is that the guy has already done the most entertaining thing - vibe coding. And now it's time for vibe debugging 💀
He's already moved on to one-shotting MS Office. It's not a serious person interested in developing , testing and maintaining a serious product. It's just another idiot without experience thinking they can replicate decades of work in a month. No interest in doing the hard work.
I saw a few of the merged PRs, it's just all LGTM without saying that. I think he's just depending on coderabbit to handle all the reviews and if it passes yolo
I am sure that eventually photo craft will become better than PS though as is the case with open source.
Look, I'm a big fan of open source projects, but GIMP is an open source Photoshop competitor that has been around for almost three decades, and it is harder to use and substantially less capable than PS. Being open source doesn't magically make something good, or mean it'll take over the industry, and there are really only a handful of cases where that's actually wound up being the case.
GIMP is an open source Photoshop competitor that has been around for almost three decades, and it is harder to use and substantially less capable than PS
GIMP is the way that it is because GIMP users like it, not because it'd be impossible to clone the UX of Photoshop. I don't actually use GIMP, but there's a comment that reads something like "GIMP is actually really easy to use and makes more sense than Photoshop," under every comment like this.
A few thoughts on this. First, GIMP looks the way it does because very little actual design and usability thought went into it. Developers put stuff wherever they thought it should go and that became the canonical location for it.
Second, modern GIMP is light-years better UI than it used to be.
Third, it also depends on what you learned. I used GIMP long before I ever touched Photoshop so I understand it better. Working in Photoshop is harder for me than GIMP.
Fourth, even with that being said I still think GIMP needs some professional UI/UX designers to dedicate major time to overhauling it.
Third, it also depends on what you learned. I used GIMP long before I ever touched Photoshop so I understand it better. Working in Photoshop is harder for me than GIMP.
I had a different experience from you and others in this thread. I started editing in GIMP and struggled a lot with it. I could get things done, but very slowly, and the results were often not... great. After about a year, I switched to Photoshop and, within about a week, had surpassed where I'd gotten to with GIMP.
This was, to be fair, almost a decade ago, though the last time I tried GIMP I still ran into a lot of the frustrations I'd had initially, though they were now compounded by the fact that I was used to how Photoshop did it, too.
Fundamentally the problem comes down to most people are allergic to change, and i dont necessarily mean this to put anyone down. The human brain us a tool for learning things but not unlearning things, unlearning habits and expectations causes actual measurable distress in subjects when tested, i personally enjoy gimp and find it fairly intuitive, ive also never actually used photoshop in the first place im sure id have the inverse learning problem that anyone coming from photoshop has
A "change" can also be for worse just as can be for better. Even Photoshop UI didn't change much (I'm affirming it because I've been using it since 6.0).\
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I also used GIMP and I say to you... If you think it's fairly intuitive, PS is a bit more
I’ve been a big fan of LibreOffice since its inception. But that might be just because I followed it from the old Star Office until it became OpenOffice, and finally forked into LibreOffice. It’s got a pedigree that goes way back, and I think it tops MS Office in UI/UX.
besides being online the dev has been pretty good in fixing bugs so I haven't had any issues with it over the years.
Edit: Apparently you can load Photopea.com, disconnect from the internet and keep using it completely offline. None of your files ever leaves your computer.
It’s at least more lightweight than the adobe versions. I‘m sure it will have better performance than the original in just a few months. Many people forget that Adobe had almost 30years to fix their software. So we should give the photocraft team some more time.
I am sure that eventually photo craft will become better than PS though
No, it won't. Not through vibe-coding, not any time soon, unfortunately.
PhotoCraft is essentially a really poor implementation of Photoshop's killer features. If you look at how it does things, it's quite literally the same features we've had on OpenSource projects for years/decades at this point. It's nothing new.
It doesn't even have color space management, which is a massive let down.
Also no .exr export.
Also no content aware fill options and many other 'killer features' from Photoshop.
It's also really laggy for tablet users who need pen pressure. Like, unusably laggy.
Say what you want about the greedy Adobe, but they know how to make good software. Their canvas engine (custom-built, not off the shelf) is perhaps the best one out there in terms of performance and features. Turns out that drawing a simple line isn't so easy! PhotoCraft proves that.
Adobe also updates their Color Management really quickly when e.g. a camera manufacturer pushes the envelope.
They're also really good at updating basically anything, e.g. if you discover a bug in their implementation of Gaussian Blur then you can be sure that someone at the company will have the knowledge and spite to update that really quickly.
This is something that the "vibe-coders" will never do.
If they were focused on actually bringing quality, they would focus on one Adobe program at a time instead of pumping 10 at the same time.
Anyone who is a professional knows that PhotoCraft jus isn't it. And that is sad. But I think the devs aren't targeting pros, they're targeting the regular user, and that is at least somewhat of a good thing, the more people that can leave Adobe's shackles the better.
i swear all these commenters here have never used photoshop for more than 3 minutes. There is a reason that basically every artist who works digitally has to have an adobe subscription.
i swear all these commenters here have never used photoshop for more than 3 minutes.
Hence the downvotes on my comment. Most people here are amateurs, and that's fine. The problem is actually believing the hype around these programs and thinking they're actual replacements for Adobe.
For now at least? They're not. I'm also rooting for the demise of Adobe, but let's not be delusional in regards to the real usability of these programs for those that actually need it: the professionals.
Was that before or after the drama a couple years ago when they updated their TOS to say they can use your art/images to train their AI and you had to accept those new terms in order to keep using (or even uninstall) their software?
That's what I'm thinking. It lacks a lot of the right-click menus so far, these functions are probably hidden in other menus, but this will change over time and then be a perfectly fine alternative to Gimp, Krita and the likes. (I never got into the GUI of Gimp, although I respect it also for its longevity.)
It was funny seeing posts about how they made a 1-to-1 copy of photoshop and it's identical and it was clear the people had never used photoshop. I installed it and took me under a minute of just random clicking around to see it was nowhere near and I could not use it for anything real. So many things missing or broken.
It would be nice if it became an actual usable program, but I won't hold my breath.
I mean, given the scope and ambition of the project it is expected, human or AI implementing so much stuff in a fresh codebase in that time frame without a pile of bugs would be a miracle. Although I am personally not a fan of the approach it will maybe get better with time.
If they'd finish features before rushing and trying to copy the next thing from Photoshop, they might get a stable software. But so far they got 50% of everything but nothing fully works.
Yeah, I share the vision. I also don't like that instead of "perfecting" a single piece of software they spread the effort into like what now? 10 different apps at this point? With the amount of compute they have in AI tokens I bet they can squash a lot more bugs and finish a lot of features but it isn't as sexy as saying they copied 13 different suites.
I wish they'd just let a human look at stuff. So much is half baked. Like you can interact with menus while you're in the control T mode but it just does nothing (Photoshop grays out menus when you hit ctrl t). There's so much vague rudimentary understanding of how Photoshop works. They just had the idea of 'hey what if Photoshop but slop' and didn't even finish that thought before asking Ai to do it. And it shows. Everywhere.
That is the nature of AI software. I work in the field, it is hard at some point not to "LGTM". But the iterative nature of AI might be able to fix it. With enough people complaining about different stuff they can get AI to fix them. If they looked at the code they wouldn't have made the project probably because looking and understanding the code is the harder time consuming part. I sound like an Nvidia exec "The solution to AI is more AI" but this is where my industry is headed...
Man.. Github is gonna be a desert once Ai companies raise the prices to make a profit. Everyone is putting stuff on it, nobody will be able to understand it.
Yeah as a Linux user trying every new update from 0.1.0 versions to the current 0.10.0 versions many of the major issues are gone and the github tickets I filed are implemented/fixed successfully already or currently in progress. ArtCraft has been actively encouraging the community to dogpile them by filing many tickets on github for each project so they can fix and implement it all. For example, I wanted Krita's 'Color to Alpha' filter, its now in PhotoCraft in Filters > other.
I'm already able to use PhotosCraft for basic stuff now. EffectCraft, despite having not used After Effects for 10+ years (immediately dropped adobe for alternatives when they removed perpetual license) I felt right at home and was able to successfully export a motion graphics video sequence.
Maybe if some are expecting industry takeover standards to usurp Adobe products it won't happen but hobbyist level thats becoming for more reliable already from my weekly tests and its only been like 2 weeks.
Yeah a large number of issues WITH a large number of pull requests is actually an amazing sign for a project. It means there are tons of people actively working on improving it. Both reporting and fixing bugs.
If the momentum doesn't die down this will be amazing in a couple of weeks or months.
Especially with the pace they have been releasing patched. Like... One every few days at the very least, always fixing tons of issues.
Just to add to this. There are literally over 2000 closed issues meaning they have either been fixed or at the very least have been reviewed and closed. The development on this project is so quick, and this will probably be closer to the new normal as more and more people start using AI this way.
Yes, it is definitely a step in the right direction but the issue is the day all the adobe clones were announced every AI bro started treating it like the end of software as a service and how all big tech companies are now doomed, which seems specially stupid considering OSS alternatives hace existed for literal decades now and are far far superior to these vibe coded apps
People are also severely underestimating the number of open issues in internal bug trackers at big companies. I have inherited old issues since before I joined my workplace and because there's always more important work to be done most of them will probably never get fixed.
Affinity - A project backed by years of being a well established one time purchase software, with a whole team dedicated to developing it, with lots of money and time put into it, later purchased and backed by Canva the fastest growing editing tool of the past several years, etc. THAT had major bugs and crashing issues when the free version released last year and has taken time to receive updates and improve.
People expecting vibe coded slop by like one person thats been out for a couple weeks to not be a complete dumpster fire of issues is absolute insanity.
It’s gonna take a lot of time for it to get better and be on the level of a professional tool. Welcome to being an early adopter of new open-source software.
With a project with so many users, I have to question. 1700 issues. Are these UNIQUE issues? Or this this the same bug listed 400 times and only having 23 actual bugs? Like, I'm not saying that it IS like that, it very well may be 1500 unique bugs. But it's worth asking.
Isnt it basically the entire featureset of photoshop? And didnt it get released like 2 weeks ago? And didnt it get so much attention that a gazillion people have downloaded it?
GitHub lumps issues in with things like feature requests too. If you filter for bugs it only shows 145, not 1.7k+. The website wasn't designed for your average person. I do wish they'd update the site a little bit to avoid all the confusion from people that don't use it.
Also AI is great at actually fixing things, point it at the issues and it'll get through them fairly quickly.
Number of issues will likely keep growing if they only rely on Claude to try and fix every bug, especially if they try adding features. Same pattern as majority of vibe coded projects. AI is a great tool but not a replacement.
Funny how a month ago everyone was against AI, concerned about the environment, this and that. All it took was a few hundred dollar subscription for you to sell your morals.
Regardless of the standard of PhotoCraft or any other AI driven software under development, OP has no clue how software development, or Github works.
Any and all software has issues, even more so for early stages of development. Would we rather a software development project not track issues, because high number scary?
1.7k issues mean people are actively using it and want improvements. I have personally used it and I can say with surety that this is improving day by day.
Photocraft is literally far away the greatest Photoshop alternative and it's only a couple weeks old. Posts like this are dumb as dirt. Keep sucking up to adobe, cuck
I get it, people hate AI slop. But the fact that anyone right now can write their own software with just a prompt is terrifying to Adobe, etc. And that is fucking great.
Now in 2026, anyone (you) can create whatever you want with AI, and it requires no programming knowledge what so ever. I hate AI generated images, videos, etc, but software generated by AI... I do not hate.
I mean the most promising thing to me is that there are people who have taken the time to report 1,700 issues. It will take an AI model minutes to fix one of those issues. It may take a person hours. I haven't used Photocraft, but I imagine in a few months, there will be a lot less bug reports, and a more functional application.
people (me) have already been able to create anything they want with programming knowledge that doesnt have 1700 issues. im not even anti ai but ppl hype up what ai is capable of too much, its like a monkey throwing its own shit at a wall n ppl calling it the mona lisa
"I mean the most promising thing to me is that there are people who have taken the time to report 1,700 issues. It will take an AI model minutes to fix one of those issues. It may take a person hours. I haven't used Photocraft, but I imagine in a few months, there will be a lot less bug reports, and a more functional application."
I suppose you never worked with larger software codebases. Fixing the bug can be easy, but in a complex solution, you need to write tests, maintain tests and QA team is a must that everything is working fine and nothing is broken. Workflows can and will be broken due to a relatively simple change sometimes.
They merged 502 PRs in one week. At least they have tests, but I'm not sure about the quality of the majority of the tests. The AI code is usually checked by AI, which is also a recipe for disaster. Also checked a few merged PRs, I'm not quite sure that the humans who are instructing the agents even know what they are doing. I would be really surprised if the slowdown of the "development" doesn't happen in this week.
There will be no Photocraft after a few months. At best, we will have a half-baked, stuff that no serious company will use.
You realize software companies are using AI as well right? But they also have knowledge, patents, and actually need to answer if it all burns to the ground.
I hate this sentiment. I write code and it sucks knowing they’re trying to replace me with this. The code is bad, the reviews suck. Everything’s terrible.
Edit: A lot of AI defenders out here telling me I can’t be bummed that my favorite part of my job, writing code, is essentially ending. And that I shouldn’t be sad that companies are going to downsize our tech sector in favor of less engineers and more AI. What a very weird position to take.
anyone working in IT in any capacity is feeling the pain on this, I'm a network engineer, and yes sometimes AI tools can be useful, trusting them emphatically is so dangerous and I Dont get how people arent seeing it.
Bro, same. My coworkers aren’t even reviewing the code they push out with it. I had to request changes on a PR that would accidentally cause 700+ extra network calls everytime someone opened a page
our NOC is going to turn into a nightmare, they're using AI to create KBs instead of actually reviewing networks, meaning we have topology maps that are basically just AI hallucinations and less than useless. We'll get a new client and they just trust the AI to import all relavent deta, not paying attention to the fact its referencing a spreadsheet that is 5+ years old (one client the DB they imported was from 2009! didnt even have half their sites on it)
I feel like AI itself isnt the problem, its how they're selling it to businesses, and unfortunately by the time the people who can actually point how how flawed it is, or why it shouldnt be used in X scenario, the company has already invested Millions in the tokens and whatnot, like it would be fine if they actually put any effort into what they're doing with these tools but so many people just go "nah its AI its got it"
I’m at a work conference this week and all I’ve heard is bullshit AI integration. “Let’s give these agents access to our financial information so they can be our personal bankers forever! It totally won’t go bad whatsoever!”
Fucking spare me lmao these people are so far up their own asses at this convention circlejerking about AI
problem is, the C-suites that make these decisions arent going to be the ones to feel any pain from it. Its all t he people who have their workload tripled with no pay, or get laid off from not being needed or even from poor financial performances that stem from over-leveraging AI. The C-suites making these decisions will still manage to increase their pay and get more bonuses.
I am also a Network Admin, but luckily in my org we use it for helpful assistance (as an example - what is the equivalent of 'show mac-address table' on a Cisco switch, but on a Ciena, Calix, Juniper) but outside of that we do not use and will NOT be using AI on the network. That would be bad bad bad. I only hope for everybody else out there that the org isn't pushing them to do dumb stuff like that... Maybe something like ISE? Sure that would make a lot of sense in a lot of ways, but not core for sure..
It's depressing watching my friends shit on generative AI then praise it for projects like these. As a lone dev in a group of artists I feel like a black sheep again and worthless
No, the benefit is that the people who actually know what they are doing can leverage it to be more productive
"it allows anyone to do this" isn't a benefit, anyone but the few people who know how it works will categorically do a shit job at it. It just doesnt look that way because people are focusing on the 0.001% of stuff that has been vibecoded with at least some tangible standards
There will be virtually zero scenarios where me or you will be willing to use an app vibecoded by the average joe
I dunno, I used it to make a couple of really niche things for myself and that was fine. I initially tried to advertise one of them, like “hey look at this cool and free thing I built”, but nobody cared. Then I realized I made it for myself and it was fine. It’s pretty cool that I get to just make the thing that I’m the only one who cares about it, and not have to worry about selling it or making sure all the bugs are ironed out.
I’ve kind of stumbled into this “portable software” idea and have vibe coded both a collection management tool and one that helps me organize help files from my MUD games a little easier.
THIS! I used some metadata editing software for some time now and I found myself wishing I had something that would also handle music/audiobooks/etc and ran modern code.
So I framed it up, used AI to flesh it out, unit tested, added features, metadata providers, etc..
And now I have this BADASS piece of software. Will I sell it? No, I might sell five copies.
But do I have a PURPOSE BUILT, FULLY CUSTOMIZED application that I'm going to use the hell out of? HELL YEAH.
I've made a few custom chrome plugins just to adjust some UI peeves on sites like Youtube. If I find myself looking for a plugin and can't find a good one for free, I pull up claude code instead.
The fact that it currently has a fantastic level of commits from Github means that a ton of people are working on the project. Give it time for the team to cook.
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