After years of modders using AI to reconstruct games, Adobe became the latest target this week: a software engineer named Brandon Thomas, who runs a venture called ArtCraft, released seven open-source applications meant to stand in for Adobe's most expensive tools.

The lineup mirrors the Creative Cloud almost app for app — PhotoCraft for Photoshop, VectorCraft for Illustrator, FilmCraft for Premiere Pro, LightCraft for Lightroom, EffectCraft for After Effects, DesignCraft for InDesign and PrintCraft for Acrobat Pro. According to VideoCardz, Thomas built them with the help of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, writing in Rust and aiming to reproduce Adobe's familiar interfaces, shortcuts and behaviour without using Adobe's source code. The apps are free, licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0, and run natively on Windows, Linux and macOS, with some also targeting the browser via WebAssembly.

Thomas has said his frustration with Adobe's subscription and cancellation fees motivated the project, and that his existing business can finance continued work. On Reddit he initially promised 100% feature parity within a month before revising the estimate to 99% within months rather than years.

The reality is more modest. Early testers report problems with basic editing, shortcuts and performance, and PhotoCraft's own roadmap concedes that real Photoshop compatibility is well under 50%, estimating that only about 25% to 35% of the functionality needed for daily professional work is in place. The project is billed as a clean-room reimplementation — behaviour recreated from descriptions rather than copied code — but critics, including some on Hacker News and in design circles, have argued that decompiling and rebuilding would not be legal in the first place. With four decades of Adobe software as the reference and trade-dress questions in the air, the legal and technical distance between a viral demo and a true replacement remains wide.

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