PhotoCraft is already better than GIMP3 in every aspect. Usability is much better, binaries are 4 times smaller, and it's way faster. GIMP takes 5+ seconds to start, vibe-coded Rust Photoshop starts instantly.
I think the "old" open source community has very low standards for user experience when it comes to GUI software. It's one of the main reasons I could never get myself to use desktop Linux.
With AI, there are no excuses for open source software to be worse in any aspect at all.
Regarding Photocraft, I've been following it with interest. My impression is that it comes off initially as an incredible accomplishment, 1:1 with Photoshop, however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGShygDux9o
This is my general impression as well with overall excitement around LLM assisted reverse engineering: very easy to get something that looks like a slam dunk, until you actually try to use it. Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
The video you linked is also three weeks old, which is an eternity in the scope of this project, since each week hundreds of PRs are merged, and several versions are released. At the speed they are going and with the amount of attention and usage they're getting, I expect they'll manage parity in months, but even in the current state, it's still useful enough.
The person testing it also seems to be an artist, so their workflow demands can be significantly different from someone doing image editing. Most artists I know use more specialized software like Clip Studio Paint over Photoshop anyway.
I think to stay competitive, open source software needs to adopt AI-first workflows that mostly automate quality control and review, rather than just allow LLM contributions. Allowing LLM contributions without sufficient infrastructure will just drown maintainers in slop.
> Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
We think it can be. This is just Pareto principle. We're hill climbing the finer curves.