An app like this can be vibe-coded in less than a week if you have some tokens to spare. Good judgment, taste, and quality design aren’t included in the token budget, though. You still have to bring those yourself, as the creator of Scissors clearly did. At least, that’s been my experience building something very similar.

The best place to start is with your own needs. I wanted to edit screenshots using layers for UI design. Break that down, and you need a canvas, a layers panel, copy/paste/cut, a selection tool, and an eraser. Want to change colors? Add a color picker and a palette. Want to save your work? Add a file format and export options.

Each need points to the next feature. Of course, once the basics work, it’s tempting to keep going until you’ve built half of Photoshop, adding things you might need someday. My app was a full working photo editor in maybe 20 hours of work.

I went through the same process when I wanted to turn a book I’d written into an EPUB. The tools I tried didn’t feel intuitive to me, so I vibe-coded an app to lay out the ebook: import or paste a long manuscript, style paragraphs as headings, subheadings, body text, or footnotes, then organize chapters and generate a table of contents. The features followed from what I needed to produce. Done in maybe 8 hours of work.

So instead of starting with “I’m going to copy this app,” start with “Here’s what I want to make.” Let that guide each step and each feature you add. Try it with something small, like a word counter. You’ll probably enjoy the process more than you expect.