Solo Developer Uses AI to Clone Adobe's Entire Creative Suite, Gives It Away Free
Brandon Thomas's ArtCraft used Anthropic's Opus 5.5 to rebuild Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom and more in Rust as free, open-source apps.
What to know
- A solo-founded startup, ArtCraft, used Anthropic's Opus 5.5 AI model to build free, open-source Rust clones of seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps (Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign, Acrobat Pro).
- Founder Brandon Thomas calls the apps 'clean-room reimplementations,' a standard defense against copyright claims, but Adobe's patents on app design and functionality leave open legal questions untested by this early-stage project.
- The software is alpha-stage with significant gaps; Thomas's initial one-month promise of full feature parity was already revised to 'months, not years' within days.
- Development is funded not by subscriptions but by selling token-based access to ArtCraft's existing AI image/video generation model built into the apps.
Brandon Thomas Founder of ArtCraft, software engineerAdobe Target companyAnthropic AI model provider
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Thomas frames the project as a template for open-sourcing paid software — Thomas argued AI tooling now lets developers recreate commercial software as free, cross-platform equivalents, suggesting the approach could extend beyond creative apps to search and other entrenched products.
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Coverage spreads, highlighting funding model and limitations
Outlets including HotHardware, Creative Bloq and Design Week picked up the story, noting the suite is funded by selling token-based access to ArtCraft's existing AI image/video model rather than by subscriptions.
“We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded.”
— Brandon Thomas -
The developer behind free, open-source alternatives to Adobe software is now taking on Microsoft Office. Brandon Thomas, the creator of the ArtCraft project, has unveiled three more tools designed to replicate Microsoft’s most popular apps: >WordCraft – an alternative to
2 more of the top 3 · 98 posts in this stretch
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Oh nooo... someone recreated Adobe's entire suite.. and it's all free and open source. So sad, won't someone think of the shareholders... 🥲
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Looks like AI will destroy the tech industry in more ways than one.
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PetaPixel reports on the apps and flags possible patent risk — Coverage detailed Thomas's background, his motivation (dislike of Adobe's subscription 'cancellation fee'), and noted that while clean-room reverse engineering is generally legal, Adobe's patents on app design and functionality could still pose risk.
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Thomas walks back the one-month parity claim on Hacker News — After commenters flagged major gaps in the alpha software, Thomas revised his timeline, saying full parity would take longer than initially promised.
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Thomas announces the project on Reddit, promises fast parity — Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build 'clean-room replacements' for Adobe's closed-source software and claimed the project would reach full feature parity within a month.
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ArtCraft pivots, debuts seven open-source Adobe app clones — Over a weekend, ArtCraft unveiled a suite recreating the interfaces and tools of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro, released as free, MIT/Apache-licensed apps for macOS, Windows and Linux.
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Brandon Thomas founds ArtCraft as an AI art-editing tool — ArtCraft launched roughly a year earlier as a 'controllable AI for artists' offering precise post-generation editing of AI-generated images and video.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by Tom's Hardware, 2d ago · also HN Frontpage, Firstpost, Mashable
4 more headlines
- Open-Source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Replications HN Frontpage · 2d ago
- After free Adobe clones, developer takes aim at Microsoft office with open-source alternatives Firstpost · 2d ago
- Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next Tom's Hardware · 2d ago
- Adobe software dupe maker takes on Microsoft Office, releasing free versions of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel Mashable · 1d ago
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first by HotHardware, 5d ago · also BigGo Finance
1 more headline
and 3 smaller pieces
What people are saying 21 voices from 4 sites · best of 98 · verbatim
- Today
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Good morning Mastodon ☕ True, people at Artcraft have also released main items of Microsoft Office: https:// getartcraft.com/apps Not an AI-fanman but in the entire discussion missing a rather big argument: apps written in Rust are cross-OS compatible - so both Adobe and M$ can be run on a Linux machine.
- Yesterday
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Vibe-coded reverse-engineered Adobe software: coming to a PC near you: arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/s... Cue a gentle chuckle for the developer, pointing the barrel of the AI gun back at our tech oligarchs. Alt text: software ate the world, and now AI eats software.
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Honestly i am a bit mad that those resources don't get used to contribute to projects like Libreoffice. That said Corporations did everything themselves with the absolute crazy AI push, and this being a black box project where everything is vibe coded by matching behaviour rather than decompiling and giving it all back for free will give a rather…
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"A developer frustrated by Adobe's cancellation fees used Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model and pure Rust to rewrite the entire Creative Cloud suite as open-source alternatives. The seven applications — PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), EffectCraft (After Effects), LightCraft (Lightroom), DesignCraft (InDesign)…
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This is cool to see, and it’s great for retail users and students who are looking to keep costs down.. definitely a nice unlock for people who cannot justify the subscription cost of Office Suite & Adobe suite both of which can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. In terms of use cases outside of retail; there won’t be much appetite for it. In…
- Oct 11
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The alternatives have always been crap and unusable and incompatible with actual professional software and this is coming from someone who loathes Windows/Adobe and tried very hard for more than a decade to not rely on Windows-only products. I know, Microsoft doesn't respect its own specs, the maintainers do a heroic job, it's free, etc. Still…
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If Buying isn't Owning, then Piracy Isn't Stealing 🤔 anyway 😁 https:// getartcraft.com/apps 🆓 This Suite works better than Microsoft Office (also sorry, better than Libre office, but still 💙 Libre) and better than the entire Adobe Suite. EffectCraft is so stellar Grab it, it's free, and my Momma had no learning curve on day 1 - fun for the…
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I am looking forward to the reaction of proprietary software companies to this new trend of individuals letting "AI" reverse engineer their software in pixel-perfect ways and uploading the resulting source code to Github, Codeberg etc under Open Source licenses. It's a weird dilemma. Will they accuse of them of stealing their intellectual…
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I've been waiting 26 years for a Visio replacement since M$ bought it, hopefully they can do it too. No other app or web-based copies are good enough still (sorta omnigraffle if you use a mac [ew, no]), and I've tried most over the years to find one as I still use Visio weekly in 2026. It's the only reason I'll actually buy a copy of real windoze…
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We are really speed running destroying the software market, the long term effects won’t be nice. There is a reason FLOSS isn’t about cloning 1-1 existing applications. That’s something we could always have done if we really wanted. What we will end up with will be corporations pushing everything to the cloud, pushing for even stricter…
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> Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cutsHas the author even opened the apps, let alone tried to use them?> GridCraft on getartcraft.com> WordCraft on getartcraft.com> 404 This page could not be found(though, "to be fair", not existing is "far from what they intend…
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Also wake me up when there’s a cloud version that works in an even vaguely similar way.The Office advantage is a suite of apps and integrations with their cloud offerings. That’s their big moat against vibe-coded apps, because few vibe-coders want to maintain a SaaS service for Office files and even fewer CIOs want to commit their company to use…
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My thinking is that cloning existing apps is missing the point. It still takes a disproportionate amount of time to get all of the functionalities and quirks of the original right. But, it takes no time to get the handful of things you need working, on your system. That is where I see the most potential: there is little need for massive pieces of…
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*Vibe-coded replicas of established commercial software-packages https://www. tomshardware.com/software/micr osoft-office/creator-of-free-adobe-clones-unveils-open-source-microsoft-office-excel-powerpoint-and-word-replications-autodesk-tools-and-other-subscription-based-services-may-come-next
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Its impressive AF tho. This is unprecedented in the reverse engineering scene, AI has made what used to be literally impossible possible. Look qt PS5 emulation for instance, or modding or these reverse enfineering projects. Its also not rly vibe coded, some random guy couldn't do this, it takes planning and verifying and a tight system to fet this…
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No serious company working in the creative industry will want anything to do with them. Even if they got the functionality and UX 1:1 perfect it would represent a massive legal risk, even having a single employee try it out on company hardware would be a huge problem. As someone who's worked on clean room re-implementations before I can already…
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They have, but these are honestly more functional already after 4 days from being released as alpha. All of these are getting 1-2 releases a day. Example the photoshop clone (photocraft) works exactly as photoshop and you can import from lightroom to photocraft and all the sliders etc. are left as set in lighroom. Something you can’t do with these…
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This is proving ai can’t deliver value on its own, it copies the labor of others and then presents it as its own creation. Add a dash of “it’s your fault if you trust what I said,” and takes the traffic for itself instead of referring back to the source. As i wrote this, it’s a pretty good metaphor of the current chrony capitalism- steals as much…
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“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones
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An AI developer is challenging Adobe with open-source clones of design tools, promoting community-driven creativity.
- Oct 9
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hey how about some good news for once? https:// futurism.com/future-society/ad obe-creative-suite-software-open-source-artcraft