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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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For an office suite LibreOffice is fine, although compatibility with MS Office is still spotty. But for graphics there really aren't drop in replacements for Adobe apps right now.
At the end of the day, I don't really care what tools software is made with. Either it works well or it doesn't. You can make quality projects using LLMs and you can make really shitty software without them. The deciding factor in both cases is skill ans knowledge of the developer building the app.
Have you seen anyone claiming that this brand-new vibe-coded thing has better compatibility (and/or feature parity) with the proprietary applications it claims to replace than the mature free software solutions currently do?
I would be surprised if it actually does anytime soon.
I agree, if it works well and it's freely licensed it's a good thing. It isn't clear how well this actually works though, and the fact that the author is disparaging existing free software solutions to advertise his business selling genAI tokens is not a good indicator.
It's made it so easy that there is currently a deluge new projects which often seem plausible at first but mostly turn out to actually be garbage upon closer inspection.
It's irrational not to be skeptical of a two-week-old project claiming to be ready (or "almost" ready, lmao) to replace multiple 30-year-old suites of software.
Let me know if I'm mistaken, and anyone other than the author tries it and credibly claims that this thing is actually a better (in any way whatsoever) replacement for MS Office than LibreOffice is.
Given that people are literally just reverse engineering these applications by having the LLM decompile it and observe what it does in memory, yeah I expect these will be compatible much faster than manual efforts. I did something similar recently where I had an LLM figure out the proprietary format for the way my Nikon camera stores RAW files. There's currently no open source implementation for it, and now I can read them using my own library. So, something that used to be a herculean effort before, is something you can now do in a few days using an LLM.
I haven't played with the Office stuff, but I am using his PhotoCraft and LightCraft, and they work fine for what I need. I can process my photos using completely open source tools now that have a UX I'm used to. Yet, I'm aware that LightTable exists, and I've tried using it, and it was not a great experience. Given how fresh these projects are, it's absolutely incredible to me. And with LLMs it's possible for me to fix whatever issues I have with the app myself. The reality is that most people don't really need to do anything incredibly complex with these tools. So, if they do what you need you have an app you can keep using indefinitely. The hard part has always been to build out the initial features and the UX which was just too hard to do by hand.
You're saying this as if NPM ecosystem didn't exist before LLMs. The reality is that there has always been a ton of garbage projects. Over time people gravitate towards projects that actually work and are useful to them. And this isn't hard problem people keep making it out to be. You look at the number of stars a project has, how long it's been developed, how many users it has, and so on. This gives you an idea of whether it has legs or not. I'll certainly trade having to rely on proprietary software for the problem of having too many open source options.
Seems to me that the rational thing is to try the project, see if it does what you need and decide based on that. But that's just me.
Have you seen the creators of this particular project claim anywhere that they decompiled anything? I've seen several commenters claiming that but I think they're incorrectly assuming that that's what they did.
For one thing, decompiling and recompiling Adobe or Microsoft code would surely be viewed as copyright infringement if there isn't a clearly-documented "cleanrooming" process in the middle (having an LLM write a spec (in English) from the decompiled code, and having another session without access to the copyrighted code write new code from that spec - a fun LARP many people are doing lately).
But also, if they were actually doing that then I'd expect more feature parity than I've seen in the few youtube videos I've skimmed through showing these apps. I'm too lazy to find the link now but I watched one comparing PhotoCraft to Photoshop, and one example was that PhotoCraft's Levels diagram is very primitive in comparison to Adobe's (or to GIMP's for that matter).
Congratulations, that's awesome (and I don't doubt it). But implementing a RAW format is a lot easier than re-implementing all of the Photoshop features which are required to be able to say (honestly, a least) "this has .PSD file format compatibility" without a long list of caveats.
I am curious how much you've actually used it. Eg, can you confirm what I saw on youtube showing the Levels adjustment dialog lacking most of the features found in Photoshop's and GIMP's? (Is that still the case in the current version?)
And have you noticed it having compatibility with (or at least some support for) any modern PSD file format features which GIMP lacks?
yes there was a lot of crap before 😭 but don't you agree it's 1000x worse now?
This project has a lot of stars but only because it just got a ton of clickbait press grossly exaggerating its completeness. I assume the vast majority of the stars are from people who have not tried running it. How long it's been developed is... two weeks, as of today. How many users? It's far too soon to say.
I agree with you here! But I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that this particular one is not likely to ever become a particularly good option.
Given how close the project matches the original, I have a hard time imagining this could've been done without examining how the original functions. And whether it's copyright infringement or not is of little interest to me since I view copyrights as being inherently harmful. However, since the implementation is using a different language, that does make the implementation itself a clean room one.
Ultimately, it's a moot point whether they decompiled or wrote a spec from scratch though. What matters is that the apps work and it mimics what Adobe ones do sufficiently well to be useful.
And it still takes time to add features using LLMs. It's not magic, and I'm more amazed how much they managed to add already rather than it not having parity yet.
Reimplementing Photoshop is obviously a much bigger effort, but I'm just using that as an illustration that LLMs are pretty good at reverse engineering work. Which makes it plausible to me that they could get a lot of the features figured out quickly.
I'm not a designer, so my needs are meagre. I want layers, to be able to select objects, add text, do color correction, and so on. Both GIMP and Photoshop are huge, so I haven't had a chance to explore the depths. All I can say is that I was able to get the things I normally do without any real friction. It does appear to work with PSDs fairly well, but again I don't have really complex ones because I use the tool in an amateur way to begin with.
What I can definitively say is that the UX is strictly superior to GIMP. Doing stuff like text manipulation like changing size or selecting fonts has always been a pain in GIMP, and as much as I want to like it, I find it painful to use. Photocraft apes Photoshop UX which I find to be superior. So, the feature parity isn't really the stumbling point for me, it's the UX.
But that's my whole point here, most people are in the same boat as me. They do a few specific things with a tool, and if those things work then the tool solves the problem.
But this is something that'll sort itself naturally over the coming months. If the developer stays active and continues working on it, then it'll keep getting better. If they abandon it and move on then it'll either die or somebody else picks it up. But it is in a fairly usable state as is from my experience, and I'd argue a lot of the hard work has already been done. So, we'll have to just wait and see what happens with it.
Another point to mention though, is that it is becoming viable to maintain your own tools now. For example, if Photocraft got abandoned. It works well enough for me, and I could have an LLM fix any gaps in the way I'm using it. I don't have to maintain a general tool that everyone can use, I can just have one that does what I need.
The barrier before was that you had to spend a lot of time to figure out how any one app works to make meaningful changes to it. And you only have so much time in a day, so you can't really take ownership of a bunch of tools like that. But with LLMs it is becoming much more practical. Grab an open source app, adopt it to work the way you want, and just keep using it. If you ever need new features, you just have the LLM add them in for you.
And if we get to the point where all this stuff can be done using local models, then we really could see Stallman's vision for GNU become a reality. Regular people, who aren't developers, could use fully open source stacks, and they could modify software to work exactly the way they want. If we're lucky this might kill closed source software entirely in the long run.
But from that perspective it would be much easier and more effective to simply use an LLM to make a crack for pirating the original software than to try to reimplement the whole thing. Or, to actually decompile and recompile it to get something (pirate-)source-available with actual feature parity. (People are also doing both of those things with various proprietary software, of course.)
That isn't what "clean room" means in this context. It is widely accepted legal doctrine that direct ports of software from one language to another constitute derivative works under copyright law.
This project's claim to be "open source" would be false if it is actually an automated port of the output of a decompiler of proprietary programs; that would make it warez.
Indeed. But if they haven't gotten around to adding more than the most basic features in the Levels adjustment window (probably one of the most commonly used features of Photoshop) I assume they're missing a lot of other stuff too.
OK, I'm taking that to mean that you haven't actually identified any specific features (or PSD compatibilities) that PhotoCraft has over GIMP besides the UX? It seems to me like using an LLM to improve the UX of GIMP, on top of all of its existing (presumably far greater) set of features, would make a lot more sense.
I concur, in six months or a year I can either eat my words or say "I told you so" :)
I wouldn't hold your breath, but perhaps with a lot more advances and if/when local models can perform coding tasks at reasonable speeds on affordable hardware... maybe? Meanwhile right now we're drowning in new 1M LOC slop projects overpromising and underdelivering.
I don't think how they went about it is really worth arguing about since we're both just speculating here. Ultimately, it's the end result that's relevant not how the sausage was made.
And we'll see if Adobe goes after them on the basis that it's warez or not. I think it's entirely likely that they might even if there's no legitimate ground to do that. Companies are well known for bullying open source projects that are viewed as a threat to their profits.
Just to reiterate this point. I do not care what level of feature parity it has with Photoshop or GIMP. My only interest is that it works for my use case, and that's what I tested. It solves a problem for me as an individual by providing me with a tool that has the UX I like and the functionality that I need.
But what is the actual problem here. It's not like I'm forced to look at any of these projects, or use them. I keep seeing people talk about this like it's some software apocalypse, but I personally have yet to be affected by any of this in a negative way. My experience so far is that I got a few useful open source apps now that let me replace proprietary ones.
And I also maintain open source projects and libraries. I haven't seen any flood of LLM generated pull requests on them either. Maybe it's a bigger issue for large and popular projects, but it seems that even there people are split on whether they like getting more contributions or not.
So, I see more upsides than downsides here on the whole.
Yes, I agree it's possible that Adobe goes after them for something even if they didn't decompile photoshop - and also even if it isn't really a threat to their profits.
Cool, if it works for you then I wouldn't tell you not to use it! I'm just skeptical that it actually will; I assume you haven't used it enough to really find out how well it works in practice yet.
I guess we're not forced to look at them but to avoid looking at them we'd need to stop reading the internet. I only looked at this one because I was conflicted about if i should delete this post from /c/opensource here - the discussion has been informative so I certainly won't now, but i'm still conflicted about the fact that by leaving this post here we're potentially helping this genAI huckster get more paying customers for his token-reselling business which this project is obviously a loss-leader for.
Btw I found the video I mentioned earlier, here is a link to the part comparing PhotoCraft's Levels adjustment to Photoshop's: https://youtu.be/Oc51Ty9h-68?t=216 (and later he compares other basic features).
Like I said, it's usable as is for random things I do day to day like making memes. Maybe I'll run into some show stoppers, but I'm fairly optimistic so far. I suspect most people who aren't graphics designers don't really have terribly sophisticated workflows. Both Photoshop and GIMP are huge, and everyone who's not a professional uses a small subset of the overall features.
And I just don't see why we should care whether this post might help some company in some unspecified way over whether these apps might help people on this forum. Especially given how niche of a forum Lemmy is in the grand scheme of things. The reason this story made it here in the first place is because it already got mainstream coverage. As you point out, the business model these companies have is unsustainable, so I don't really spend time worrying about how many customers these companies get in the short run. We're very obviously in a bubble here, and there's no credible business model. These companies are basically subsidizing people having fun, and I don't really see much of an issue with that. The bubble will pop and most of the negative side effects will go with it. My expectation is that local models is where things are headed after the bubble.
And yeah that video is precisely why I think Photocraft is fine. He's a professional designer, and he is used to using parts of the tool I just don't need. The basic levels adjustment is all I ever use for example. But take something like adding a stroke to text. This is a common thing I do if I make a meme. In Photocraft, I just add some text, go to blending options on the layer and add stroke. Done. In GIMP, this is a whole adventure last I tried.