I'm pretty sure a good portion of Canva is vibe-coded too. You could argue Canva has tests, QA, etc. But somehow I feel we just tend to associate quality to commercial products.
Sorry to break it to you, its from our internal project (only the editor part) which had way less feature. And you should watch commit history of open source projects more often every single one usages Claude/codex, people no longer code by hand its over.
A lot of what makes Canva stand out comes from its IP coupled to their ecosystem/product (templates, assets and stock photography), its otherwise a pretty simple tool with basic functionality (but with good UX) compared with more professional software like photoshop or illustrator, or Figma. I'm sure you can built an open source equivalent in terms of software, but I don't think it's really possible for open source to produce a true replacement or alternative.
THAT ASIDE, it might be worth focusing on UX. This looks vibe coded, maybe it isn't.
- The UI is broken in a few places (the tools text in the shapes menu)
- Consider prioritising more important tools based on available space in the ui, the header is a bit cluttered.
- Some of the tool menus are awkward to use, like in Canva those are in a side bar and when they open the have panels that don't disappear when their parent looses focus. Probably worth making sure you're not using their exact icons as well as these look pretty similar.
- Your add page button is creating an awkward scroll which you could probably limit by exposing add page in a way that didn't do that. Maybe remove the add page button below the canvas, as you already have an add page button in the bottom left, you should have more vertical space for the design as a result.
- You've got several different export sharing options in the header side by side. Might be worth collapsing that into a menu to minimise clutter. Both tools like canva and more professional tools layout their UIs like this. By all means do don't it just because they are, but there is some rational here why they would.
- There are two places in the header that talk about the save state on the left and the right (one saying saved, the other saying saved in the browser). Consider having consolidating that.
- do you really want to place the copy "Sign up to keep it forever" next to the sign up button? do you have any reason this is likely to stand out from the rest of the UI features there? I reckon if not get rid of it. Or if it's that important get rid of anything competiting for its attention which right now is a lot of things.
- you have a ellipses for a menu with a ton of options, in most software this is aligned to the left. If you've removed other things frmo the the head it may make sense to break that up in submenus so those pieces of functionality is more discoverable.
- Your commment functionality requires sign up to use, keeping it there may help lead to signs ups, but if you're designing this as an open source tool, maybe you're less interested in growth hacking, it might make sense to remove it from the header as well when the user isn't signed in (at the same time keeping it there signals to people weighing up your product that that feature exists.
- you have 2 layers of headers, is it worth utilising horitonzal space for some of your buttons and put them in the right hand side?
Hopefully you can feed the above back into your agent on a loop lol.
AI doesn't change this. Would I rather use some hobby project or the real tool? Depends on my budget and how much I care about functionality/quality – sometimes the hobby project, often the real tool. How long each took to develop is not a factor in my purchasing decision.
I'm not expecting the people who take the vibecode shortcut to have the discipline and commitment and talent to steward their projects in the manner of the successful ones I've come to trust in the past.
Yeah, I would and do, but many people like shiny and just jump around for some reason. And the ones that have a reason and make products popular overnight, have as reason that they need likes and upvotes as they are influencers.
People who have jobs, lives, other stuff to do in other words, keep sending me 'the latest new bla' many times per day, every day. All products that will be gone tomorrow.
I mean, AI made my own canva because my wife uses it and hates their support, bizarre amounts of long standing critical showstopper bugs and attitude to long standing members. So I hope they do get vibecoded to death, however, I would not release such a project until after a year of testing and fixing, which is where our version is about. Canva in the basis, like Miro etc is a one shot with Opus 5.5: it works fine-ish. But you will need months of grind to get it so people will want to use it.
Edit: in the vibecode age, 2000 commits would be the minimum to consider a project maintained. And then I do have a script to analyse the 'effort' of an average commit because some people fake commits with crap to inflate the number.
https://github.com/shaongitbd/doory/commit/eac7e3b
THAT ASIDE, it might be worth focusing on UX. This looks vibe coded, maybe it isn't.
- The UI is broken in a few places (the tools text in the shapes menu)
- Consider prioritising more important tools based on available space in the ui, the header is a bit cluttered.
- Some of the tool menus are awkward to use, like in Canva those are in a side bar and when they open the have panels that don't disappear when their parent looses focus. Probably worth making sure you're not using their exact icons as well as these look pretty similar.
- Your add page button is creating an awkward scroll which you could probably limit by exposing add page in a way that didn't do that. Maybe remove the add page button below the canvas, as you already have an add page button in the bottom left, you should have more vertical space for the design as a result.
- You've got several different export sharing options in the header side by side. Might be worth collapsing that into a menu to minimise clutter. Both tools like canva and more professional tools layout their UIs like this. By all means do don't it just because they are, but there is some rational here why they would.
- There are two places in the header that talk about the save state on the left and the right (one saying saved, the other saying saved in the browser). Consider having consolidating that.
- do you really want to place the copy "Sign up to keep it forever" next to the sign up button? do you have any reason this is likely to stand out from the rest of the UI features there? I reckon if not get rid of it. Or if it's that important get rid of anything competiting for its attention which right now is a lot of things.
- you have a ellipses for a menu with a ton of options, in most software this is aligned to the left. If you've removed other things frmo the the head it may make sense to break that up in submenus so those pieces of functionality is more discoverable.
- Your commment functionality requires sign up to use, keeping it there may help lead to signs ups, but if you're designing this as an open source tool, maybe you're less interested in growth hacking, it might make sense to remove it from the header as well when the user isn't signed in (at the same time keeping it there signals to people weighing up your product that that feature exists.
- you have 2 layers of headers, is it worth utilising horitonzal space for some of your buttons and put them in the right hand side?
Hopefully you can feed the above back into your agent on a loop lol.
Claude is the author on the commits.
This also works with paid closed source software today.
People who have jobs, lives, other stuff to do in other words, keep sending me 'the latest new bla' many times per day, every day. All products that will be gone tomorrow.
I mean, AI made my own canva because my wife uses it and hates their support, bizarre amounts of long standing critical showstopper bugs and attitude to long standing members. So I hope they do get vibecoded to death, however, I would not release such a project until after a year of testing and fixing, which is where our version is about. Canva in the basis, like Miro etc is a one shot with Opus 5.5: it works fine-ish. But you will need months of grind to get it so people will want to use it.
Edit: in the vibecode age, 2000 commits would be the minimum to consider a project maintained. And then I do have a script to analyse the 'effort' of an average commit because some people fake commits with crap to inflate the number.
There are many too many new projects (OSS and closed) that have AI in them and existing projects (Linux, etc.) that are getting tainted by AI.
I think this is a lost cause.