Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones

A developer behind Artcraft announced a suite of seven open-source apps meant to mimic Adobe Creative Cloud - recreations of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro - written in Rust with WebAssembly builds for the browser. The project uses Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to accelerate “clean-room” reverse engineering of interfaces and functionality, and the code is being released under permissive MIT/Apache licenses. Artcraft began as a controllable visual-AI tool for image and video editing and now embeds its own imagery model alongside third-party options; current builds are described as “super early alpha,” with visible feature gaps even as screenshots and UI borrow heavily from Adobe’s look.

The lead developer, Brandon Thomas, says he’s been coding exclusively with AI since February and vows rapid progress toward parity, at first claiming 100% feature equivalence within a month and later tempering that to high parity in months rather than years. Funding will come from tokenized access to Artcraft’s AI model and IDE to avoid orphaning the project. Observers note legal exposure around trade dress despite reverse engineering often being lawful, and community feedback has highlighted many shortcomings. Thomas frames the effort as a broader push to replace dominant proprietary tools and “de-enshittify” tech by enabling one-to-one open alternatives.