What Happens When an AI Team Clean-Room Ports Photoshop in Two Weeks?
On Syntax, a clean-room reimplementation with a two-week commit history opens real layered Photoshop files nearly perfectly and faster than Photoshop. The hosts' read: the gap is interaction polish, platform gatekeeping is returning, and two moats remain — UI quality and caring past two days.
What happens when an AI team clean-room ports Photoshop in two weeks?
A working, fast, file-compatible reimplementation of most of the Adobe suite appeared with commits going back just two weeks — and it opened a 25-year power user's real layered Photoshop files almost perfectly. Scott Tolinski's opening verdict on Syntax is blunt: Adobe is in trouble. The GitHub history, he says, does not go past two weeks ago. And the reviewer is the harshest possible audience: a 25-year Photoshop user who has tried every alternative and pays $80 a month only because nothing else comes close. The hosts' conclusions are less about the clone than about what it proves: interaction polish is still the moat, platform gatekeeping is back, and the real Photoshop successor will be a generational shift, not a free copy.
Clean room, two agents, thousands of tests
The legality story is the two-agent split: one agent documents every surface and behavior of the original app, and a separate implementation agent — which never touches it — writes the code, with thousands of tests and fixture Photoshop files standing in as evidence. Scott is honest that whether the project truly followed the protocol is unverified. Wes reads the intent differently: the company behind it builds GUI tools for LLM image editing, and his bet is they will reimplement Adobe's AI features (circle something, add a cowboy hat) as their own paid service. One engineering footnote: the whole UI is built in Rust on the team's own crate — not GPUI.
What breaks, and what that teaches
A two-gigabyte document with seven artboards crashes the app outright. Wes's general law: UI is the hardest part of vibe-coded software — the collapse behaviors, the control-click masking, the drag-and-drop semantics, with state machines all the way down. Scott notes the app opens faster than Photoshop and files render near-perfectly, so the gap is precisely interaction, and four months after a blog post asked where all the vibe-coded Photoshops were, most of the Adobe suite now exists.
The gatekeeping backdrop
The port landed mid-controversy: Figma's MCP blocked the Pi harness and pointed applicants to a Google form that answers "not accepting any at this time." Wes places Figma in the wider retrenchment — Amazon does not want agents shopping, Reddit blocks Claude, Twitter blocks ChatGPT — a rerun of the API shutdowns, because platforms want the traffic and the money through themselves. And he credits Dylan Field's clapback — "can you help me understand why you don't make various Anthropic resources available via the MCP?" — since Anthropic itself restricts where its subscriptions may run.
Two moats and a paper cut
So what actually protects creative software? Not the code: Wes argues the Photoshop replacement will be something a little different, a generational shift on the Figma model, not a free clone. What remains is, first, interaction quality — the itty-bitty clicking and dragging where Figma won and AI apps are weakest — and second, per Wes's own tweet, "the only moat left is caring about your project past two days." The paper-cut illustration: ffmpeg absorbed many low-level video problems, but audio crackles and dropped frames on weird hardware are why Adobe employs full-time fixers — the seven-or-eight cuts that make users leave, and the reason both hosts wish the port shipped error capture. The model for winning, per Wes: DaVinci Resolve's cadence of useful releases, which nobody else in video editing matches.
Interview Highlights
3 exchanges- Q
What does a 'clean room' reimplementation actually mean here?
Scott Tolinski asked06:30AScott Tolinski answeredScott explains, after Wes declines: straight reverse engineering of someone's software is legally dubious — you cannot just crack it open and reimplement it, however much you hate Adobe. A clean room splits the work: one agent goes through the entire application documenting every surface, feature, and behavior, and passes descriptions and tests to a separate implementation agent that has never touched the original. Whether this project truly did that, Scott does not know — but he notes there are thousands of tests and thousands of Photoshop files being tested against, and the same for Illustrator, the video editor, and the rest.
- Q
Will the thing that replaces Photoshop be a free clone — or something generationaly different?
Wes Bos asked18:07AWes Bos, Scott Tolinski answeredWes's answer is the latter. Nobody using Adobe products is happy about it, but they are the best and the industry standard, so a like-for-like free clone is not the replacement. The precedent is Figma: designers moved out of Photoshop (via Illustrator and Sketch) not to a cheaper clone but to a sufficiently new evolution — multiplayer, browser-anywhere — that rewired how design works. Scott adds that everyone is trying to crack the next form of video and photo editing and nobody has; whatever lands will not be the same Photoshop but free or faster, because Adobe is adding AI too — it must be a generational shift, and as with Figma, you almost do not know what it is until somebody does it.
- Q
What moat actually protects creative software like Photoshop in the AI era?
Wes Bos asked21:34AWes Bos, Scott Tolinski answeredWes proposes two. First, genuinely good UI interaction — the itty-bitty clicking, dragging, and pasting — which is why Figma originally won, and whoever cracks a really good photo-editing UI with AI will win this round; the weakest point of AI-generated apps is exactly that interaction layer, with its state machines all the way down. Second, someone who cares — riffing on his own tweet that 'the only moat left is caring about your project past two days.' Scott illustrates with video: ffmpeg solved many low-level primitives, but audio crackles and dropped frames on weird hardware remain, and at Adobe people's full-time jobs are fixing exactly those seven-or-eight paper cuts; both hosts wish this project shipped error capture so a fixer agent could even begin.