Software developer Brandon Thomas debuted a suite of seven open source applications designed to recreate the user interface and tools of Adobe products. The new tools target Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
Artcraft originally launched last year as a controllable AI tool for artists focused on post-generation editing of images and videos. Over the weekend, the brand shifted focus to introduce these seven open source software alternatives.
An AI-powered developer built clean-room replacements
Brandon Thomas announced the release on Reddit, explaining that he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create clean-room replacements for Adobe software written in Rust. Browser versions are also available via WebAssembly.
Commenters on Hacker News and other platforms pointed out numerous current shortcomings in the software. Thomas made the promise that the super early alpha state will quickly lead to functional parity with Adobe products.
Thomas stated on Reddit that he plans to reach 100 percent feature parity within a month by addressing bugs and adding features based on community reports. On Hacker News, he later amended that position to say that 99 percent parity will take months rather than years.
Frustration with subscription fees inspired the project
Thomas stated on Hacker News that he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects. He was inspired to build open source Adobe alternatives after dealing with cancellation fee dark patterns too many times.
The apps are offered for free under MIT and Apache licenses. Development will be funded by selling token-based access to the pre-existing Artcraft visual AI model and integrated development environment.
Thomas noted that this revenue stream will prevent the project from becoming an orphaned small-team effort. He stated that his team builds popular software for filmmakers, ensuring the project is fully funded.
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Thomas is part of a long line of coders using AI tools to accelerate the reverse engineering of software functionality without copying code directly. While reverse engineering is generally legally acceptable, the Artcraft apps could face legal trouble if their trade dress mimics Adobe's interface too closely.
Thomas has coded exclusively with AI tools since February and predicts a future where developers can recreate paid software to replace existing tech products. He claimed to have one-shotted Photoshop and declared that software is over.
Community reports and bug fixes will guide the ongoing development as Thomas works to scale the feature set of the new open source applications.
