No, you can’t replace photoshop with the AI recreation of photoshop. And I don’t think that you ever will.

That is not at all to say that I don’t think that tools created with the help of AI coding agents won’t be made. I do. I also think that some of those tools will be very good. Maybe even better than something like photoshop. I also think that, at this point, a lot of the the new features of photoshop will be created with or using coding agents. They are just too powerful to ignore. The problem is, they are absolute fucking idiots. And, despite what some silicon valley paint sniffers would have you believe, they will always be fucking idiots.

You know what else is a fucking idiot? Hammers, chisels, lathes, soldering irons, skillets, radios, books, jet airplanes, nuclear reactors, and smart phones. All absolutely simple as dirt. Could not, and would not, do a single useful thing without the help of a person.

Of course none of that is a bad thing. Soldering irons are super useful, and it would be borderline impossible to repair electronics without one. It is a wonderful tool that is exceptional at a certain type of job. I wouldn’t get one to type up an email for me. Because it’s a fucking idiot.

People like to get into these hype spirals where increasingly loud weirdos will yell increasingly wild and inaccurate predictions in the hopes that someone less bright will give them money. Sometimes they even believe the wild and inaccurate predictions they yell. Those are the ones you really have to worry about.

Here’s the thing. Photoshop is an exceptional tool. It is also a tool that has been continuously worked on and built by people to be exceptional for nearly 40 years. It would be an absolutely awful word processor. It was built for a purpose. With intention.

AI coding tools are really good at coding. Staggeringly good considering the staggeringly short amount of time people have been working with them. They are also fucking idiots.

If you show photoshop to an AI coding tool it can attempt to replicate what you have just shown it. It can even reverse engineer some of the code and try to reconstruct what it finds. What it doesn’t have is the hope that the feature it’s working on will finally solve a problem that it’s been having. It doesn’t have a certain shot in Terminator 2 that was described to it in notes and storyboards by James Cameron that it is sure it can help out with if only the paint tool worked in a certain way. It didn’t try a feature, only to realize that what it just built didn’t fix the problem properly, but that the pixel multiplying function it just wrote might be useful for a different purpose so it probably shouldn’t throw it out.

Photoshop took time and work and iteration to create. If I had to guess, most of the features that are in there today were probably written and rewritten multiple times before they worked just right. Each button press and stylus drag had to be considered by a person. Because that’s who will be using it after all. People.

Many of the features that are currently in photoshop don’t work just right at the moment due to any number of factors. Maybe the developers think a feature does work right, but they never really use that part of the program so they can’t see why it might be wrong for certain workflows. Maybe touching that feature would break some other legacy compatibility. Maybe no one has gotten around to looking at it in the past decade or so. Maybe working on that particular feature has been deemed too costly and even though someone could fix it, no one is going to. An AI coding tool will never consider any of that, and that’s a problem too.

We build tools for people to use. We only know how to refine and hone those tools because people use them. The people that use the tools give feedback to the people working on the tools and tell them how they would like the tools to feel. The people working on the tools understand the feeling of working with a tool that doesn’t handle quite right, because they themselves are people who have used a tool that didn’t handle quite right. That helps them to adapt the tool toward the way another person might want to work with it. AI coding tools are great at code, but when it comes to empathizing with a human using a tool they are fucking idiots. But so is the soldering iron, and it does okay with the work we give it.

So it’s not that I think people won’t be able to use AI coding tools to make something like photoshop. They can and they will. But when making any sort of tool the important part to remember is that people will use it. Replicating something you’ve seen and studied, but never used is going to make for a bad tool. Using it is the point. Iterating on it while using it is the point. That is the only way to make a tool. Photoshop is a tool. Understanding it means using it. Care and iteration and human effort are baked into the process of make a tool. If you try to take any of those out, you’ll make something, but it won’t be a tool anyone will want to use.