About why nobody has vibe-coded large applications like Photoshop yet.
Has this happened?
Yes 40 (33%)Not sure 17 (14%)No 66 (54%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About why nobody has vibe-coded large applications like Photoshop yet.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
If Photoshop can be vibe coded in a couple of weeks, that's superintelligence.
I think of "tokens" as units of intelligence spent on a problem.
Producing software like Photoshop, Linux, or Excel literally cost billions of tokens (human intelligence back then, and now both human and artificial intelligence combined). A lot of deep intellectual problems were solved along the way, and the token cost of solving them accumulated. The true cost of Photoshop today should be measured in billions, maybe trillions of tokens.
AI can definitely generate some tokens, and it has accelerated everything involving intelligence. But it still can't produce 100 billion tokens worth of intelligence in a week. When that day comes, that's superintelligence. We'll go to Mars, we'll make fusion work. That's the singularity.