I installed vibecoded Photoshop. The binary is 3 times smaller than GIMP, usability is much better, and it opens instantly while GIMP 3 takes five seconds.
As far as I can tell, they copied nearly every tool and menu and their behavior one for one. I'm not an illustrator so I can't tell how well they copied brush behavior for painting, but as far as editing goes, this does almost everything. One noticeable omission that I could find is lack of frame by frame animation and gif export.
I pirated photoshop when I was 12 and kept using that for image editing my entire life. The clone feels completely familiar and does exactly what my muscle memory expects photoshop to do.
I agree with many others in the thread. It’s pretty much impossible to not install apps that have “vibe coded” aspects to them now, if not completely vibe coded. We see this with Amazon/AWS boasting that a large percent of their code is now AI generated.
I think with that in mind, scanning tools like Trivy become more useful.
I am building a tool (https://github.com/trypando/pando) to help people deploy vibe coded apps at companies more safely and easily, and share them securely.
This has been really well received, and I think it’s because YES there are risks with AI generated apps, but the risks don’t currently outweigh the productivity gains.
No. I see the risk of a vibe coder getting prompt-injected to be negligible compared to a programmer being malicious themselves, and I've been running closed source executables for decades.
In general, I find that new vibe coded (or at least AI-assisted) user-facing software tends to be good, actually. LLMs don't have a 9 to 5 job, and don't get burnt out or tired. Vibe coded software tends to have attention to detail that I don't see in human-written open source software because a human wouldn't bother.
I'm enjoying democratization of software. Maybe in a few years we will have a vibe-coded open source Windows replacement.
I'm hesitant to, but more because it seems that many vibe coded apps* that I've come across have a week's worth of commits and no activity for the past 2-3 weeks. I have trouble imagining somebody who one-shotted an app is going to support that app for any reasonable lifespan. And, to your point, not only am I concerned about longevity of the app, but security and data harvesting concerns are also there.
*"vibe coded apps" in this context are ones whose description is full of emojis, the repo is in somebody's recently created personal GitHub account, and where there are likely already other apps addressing the same or similar use cases.
How do you know if it's vibe coded or not? 60% of any app is third party dependencies that some random guy across the globe maintains, and the developer never even checked how the code is written.
Also, why vibe coded apps are prone to have viruses, and non vibe coded apps are virus free and have perfect security?
If it's open source, you can check the code, vibe coded or not (I doubt the majority does).
If it's a commercial app, the developer(s) probably care more about making money than writing the "perfectly secure" app, vibe coded or not.
I avoid them. Some look cool, and might even be useful… but is there something lurking in the code the developer doesn’t even know about? Will it get support? Was there any thought or care when it comes to security? How long before the developer moves on to their next vibe coded project… an hour?
The only pure vibe coded apps on my computer (that I’m aware of), are ones I made myself.
Speaking from the builder side: In my case no. To prevent this sort of problem I would like to learn relate knowledge then ask agent to audit one by one.
User side: write a skill then ask Agent to audit it rather than just ask agent with one sentence
At this point, I always ask my AI tool of choice to audit the Github before installing an open-source tool, so I'm not that concerned about security.
I'm mostly hesitant to install vibe-coded apps because they sadly tend to be shiny but quickly-abandoned slop, with tons of bugs or performance issues.
The sort of product of a vibe coded app is just not that great in all. Giant codebase usually, have fun reviewing that.
These sorts of pre ai github abandonware projects were usually quite leanly written, did a simple thing and that's it. Feature complete, and easy to build upon yourself if you wanted to take it further.
Lindy's law applies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I'm not going to install vibecoded Photoshop when gimp exists.
I installed vibecoded Photoshop. The binary is 3 times smaller than GIMP, usability is much better, and it opens instantly while GIMP 3 takes five seconds.
How is the feature parity?
As far as I can tell, they copied nearly every tool and menu and their behavior one for one. I'm not an illustrator so I can't tell how well they copied brush behavior for painting, but as far as editing goes, this does almost everything. One noticeable omission that I could find is lack of frame by frame animation and gif export.
I pirated photoshop when I was 12 and kept using that for image editing my entire life. The clone feels completely familiar and does exactly what my muscle memory expects photoshop to do.
Except when it turns out that some random features don't work as expected it pisses me off enormously as it breaks the whole promise of the clone.
Give it some time. There is a whole community right now hunting edge cases and submitting and merging pull requests.
I agree with many others in the thread. It’s pretty much impossible to not install apps that have “vibe coded” aspects to them now, if not completely vibe coded. We see this with Amazon/AWS boasting that a large percent of their code is now AI generated.
I think with that in mind, scanning tools like Trivy become more useful.
I am building a tool (https://github.com/trypando/pando) to help people deploy vibe coded apps at companies more safely and easily, and share them securely.
This has been really well received, and I think it’s because YES there are risks with AI generated apps, but the risks don’t currently outweigh the productivity gains.
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No. I see the risk of a vibe coder getting prompt-injected to be negligible compared to a programmer being malicious themselves, and I've been running closed source executables for decades.
In general, I find that new vibe coded (or at least AI-assisted) user-facing software tends to be good, actually. LLMs don't have a 9 to 5 job, and don't get burnt out or tired. Vibe coded software tends to have attention to detail that I don't see in human-written open source software because a human wouldn't bother.
I'm enjoying democratization of software. Maybe in a few years we will have a vibe-coded open source Windows replacement.
No. I simply don't (apart from company mandated ones like Claude Code), or do it in isolated VMs.
If it feels vibe coded, chances are that they haven't run it through sufficient QA or a mindful design approach yet.
Or they simply haven't developed the taste to understand why it feels off, and likely aren't domain experts either.
I'm hesitant to, but more because it seems that many vibe coded apps* that I've come across have a week's worth of commits and no activity for the past 2-3 weeks. I have trouble imagining somebody who one-shotted an app is going to support that app for any reasonable lifespan. And, to your point, not only am I concerned about longevity of the app, but security and data harvesting concerns are also there.
*"vibe coded apps" in this context are ones whose description is full of emojis, the repo is in somebody's recently created personal GitHub account, and where there are likely already other apps addressing the same or similar use cases.
How do you know if it's vibe coded or not? 60% of any app is third party dependencies that some random guy across the globe maintains, and the developer never even checked how the code is written.
Also, why vibe coded apps are prone to have viruses, and non vibe coded apps are virus free and have perfect security?
If it's open source, you can check the code, vibe coded or not (I doubt the majority does).
If it's a commercial app, the developer(s) probably care more about making money than writing the "perfectly secure" app, vibe coded or not.
With AI you cannot know for sure if an app is vibe coded or not, especially when there's no source code.
Therefore, one must assume it is always vibe coded.
Therefore, one must always be hesitant :(
Weren't you hesitant downloading apps pre-LLM? If you were, what is the difference?
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I avoid them. Some look cool, and might even be useful… but is there something lurking in the code the developer doesn’t even know about? Will it get support? Was there any thought or care when it comes to security? How long before the developer moves on to their next vibe coded project… an hour?
The only pure vibe coded apps on my computer (that I’m aware of), are ones I made myself.
but is it really a problem that it is vibe coding per se? Your framing is also equally applicable for a human coded app.
Speaking from the builder side: In my case no. To prevent this sort of problem I would like to learn relate knowledge then ask agent to audit one by one. User side: write a skill then ask Agent to audit it rather than just ask agent with one sentence
Depends on the type of app, complexity, and product space. If it’s something I know well and it’s simple — why not vibe code my own?
It is not vibe-coded or not, but who vibe-coded it, and what do others say about, like the stars on github.
I would ask why they chose for it to need to be installed, rather than just delivering some web application
I'm hesitant to even use Linux due to vibe coding bleeding into the kernel.
depends on the source, but if it is open source and someone I trust I suppose the same amount of suspiciousness asa non vibe coded app?
At this point, I always ask my AI tool of choice to audit the Github before installing an open-source tool, so I'm not that concerned about security.
I'm mostly hesitant to install vibe-coded apps because they sadly tend to be shiny but quickly-abandoned slop, with tons of bugs or performance issues.
The sort of product of a vibe coded app is just not that great in all. Giant codebase usually, have fun reviewing that.
These sorts of pre ai github abandonware projects were usually quite leanly written, did a simple thing and that's it. Feature complete, and easy to build upon yourself if you wanted to take it further.
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Generally, yes. Not because I'm afraid of supply chain attacks or other funny business (though they're still concerning), but because:
- I like my software to contain as few bugs as possible
- I like my software to be maintained (90+% of these vibe coded projects are abandoned almost immediately, "just fork it bro" is not an answer)
- I like my software to do a few things well
- I like my software to use as little system resources as necessary to do its job
Pre-AI software was already bad enough, but if I see something that looks vibe coded, I have found I can reliably assume it meets none of my criteria.
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