Where are the vibecoded Photoshops? — INDIEPIXEL BLOG

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Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?

2026-05-18 · gizmo64k

If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now. Two years of access. Millions of people with the tools. The barrier supposedly fell, right? RIGHT? So where is everything?

Show me the evidence

Where is the vibecoded Photoshop. The vibecoded Excel. The vibecoded Maya. The vibecoded Blender. The vibecoded compiler that compiles itself. The vibecoded database, the vibecoded OS, the vibecoded anything-that-requires-architectural-judgment-to-hold-together. Huh?

I am not asking for slop. Slop exists, slop is easy, slop is not the question. I am asking for the coherent, complex, non-trivial things that vibecoding allegedly makes accessible to anyone who can prompt.

Silence. Every time. The category is empty.

And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.

Accusation without evidence

There are no vibecoded Photoshops because vibecoding does not do what the rhetoric claims it does. The accusation itself is the vibe. The accuser feels that a thing must have been easy because it was made with AI. They post that feeling as if it were a finding. The finding never has to be checked, because nobody else checks it either. The accusation travels because it feels right, not because it is right. Big difference.

The accusation that someone produced unverified output is itself being produced as unverified output. Or in other words.. The thing they accuse vibecoders of is the very thing they are doing: No definition. No test. No falsification. Just a claim, shipped fast, never checked. The accusation is the real vibecoded content. The accuser is the vibecoder. They accuse others of the very crime they are committing themselves, and most of them are unaware of doing it.

The line in the sand

Their whole attack vector is built around the premise of defending a gate that doesn't need defense, and a threat that doesn't even exist. I can prove it.

There are levels in this work. Level 1 is the typing. Syntax, semicolons, the years memorizing pointer arithmetic and which header file the function lives in. Level 2 is the verifying. The harness. The test suite. The reflex of rejecting the ninety attempts that almost work and shipping the one that does. Level 3 is the deciding. What to build at all. Which architecture survives contact with the real world. The three have never been the same thing. The gate was never at Level 1. The gate was at Levels 2 and 3, where the work that holds together actually happens.

AI lowered the cost of Level 1. It did not touch Levels 2 or 3. The gate is exactly where it always was.

The Level 2 and 3 people can see this. They look at SoulPlayer and ask about the harness. They look at an AI music video and ask about the timing decisions or how consistency was enforced. They are at the gate. They know where the gate is. They recognize when someone else is also at the gate.

The accusers cannot see this. They are not at the gate. They were at Level 1. Level 1 was their identity, their hours, their proof of belonging, their reason to feel at home in this profession. When AI made Level 1 cheap, it did not threaten the gate. It threatened them. Because they bet their self-worth on the layer that just got rented out.

So they call the work vibecoded. They have to. The new artifact cannot be legitimate, because if it is legitimate, then Level 1 was never the gate, and they were never at the gate either. Exactly, and I feel sorry for everyone who is solely operating at Level 1 and with nothing left to contribute. If AI revealed they were never doing the deciding, that they were never doing the verifying, that they were the typist all along, then they are in deep trouble right now.

And they are finding this out in public. By panicking at the wrong things. By calling other people's work vibecoded because that is the only move left when the floor disappears under you.

I do not feel angry at them. I feel sorry for them.

I will not use this accusation

I could. I have receipts.

SoulPlayer has a ninety-test verification harness developed in Python that emits the C64 assembly and binary. Four bit-identical reference implementations have to agree before anything ships. I made sixteen AI music videos, weeks of work each, spent months creating our own custom inference toolchain in order to gain a maximum of control over the final frame. I have been the person you call when nothing else works, in rooms full of people who would never have called me on a good day. I know where the gate is. I have been at the gate since before this profession called it a gate.

My demoscene background alone would allow me to turn around and call other people's work vibecoded. I could punch down at every prompt-and-pray app on the internet and land a lot of hits.

I will not.

Because I...