AI-Powered Artcraft Developer Builds Open-Source Adobe Alternatives

Summary

Artcraft, initially presented as a controllable AI tool for artists, has introduced seven open-source applications modeled on the interfaces and tools of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. Developer Brandon Thomas says he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to create clean-room replacements in Rust, with WebAssembly versions available in browsers. The project is currently a very early alpha, and commenters have identified numerous missing features and bugs. Thomas first said the apps could reach full feature parity within a month, then revised that claim to say 99 percent parity would take months rather than years. The applications are released under MIT or Apache licenses, while development is intended to be funded by token-based access to Artcraft’s existing visual AI model and IDE. The apps can also offer image-generation models, including third-party models. The project reflects a broader effort to use AI tools to accelerate software reverse engineering, which can be legally permissible when functionality is replicated without copying source code. However, Thomas acknowledges that closely copying Adobe’s visual appearance and interface could create trade-dress concerns. He says the longer-term goal is for developers to recreate functional, cross-platform open-source versions of widely used paid software.