Brandon Thomas grew frustrated with Adobe. Cancellation fees stung one too many times. So he did something about it.

He built clones. Not just one. Seven. All open source. All in Rust. And he did most of it with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5.

The project, called ArtCraft, dropped last week. PhotoCraft mimics Photoshop. VectorCraft stands in for Illustrator. FilmCraft takes on Premiere. The list continues through LightCraft for Lightroom, EffectCraft for After Effects, DesignCraft for InDesign, and PrintCraft for Acrobat Pro. (Ars Technica, Oct. 7, 2026)

Thomas announced the pivot on Reddit. These aren’t wrappers or Electron shells. They run natively on macOS, Windows, Linux. WebAssembly versions work in browsers. The code carries MIT or Apache-2.0 licenses. Anyone can inspect, fork, improve.

“We’re going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month,” Thomas wrote in that Reddit post. Days later on Hacker News he dialed it back. “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”

The apps look the part. Screenshots shared widely show interfaces that could pass for Adobe’s at first glance. Layers. Tools. Menus. They open real PSD files with surprising fidelity in early tests. But looks deceive. Thomas himself rates PhotoCraft at roughly 65% pixel-matching accuracy despite claiming 100% menu coverage. (PetaPixel, Oct. 7, 2026)

Thomas founded ArtCraft nearly a year ago. Back then it focused on controllable AI for artists. Users could edit AI-generated images and videos with precision. The company shifted hard. Now the core offer is free software. Revenue comes from token-based access to ArtCraft’s own visual AI models and an integrated IDE. Third-party models work too. No subscription required for basic functions.

He brings real experience. Former CEO of Storyteller.ai. Software engineer at Square. Background in large-scale Rust systems and even robotics. This isn’t a hobbyist weekend project. Yet the speed still shocks. Repositories appeared between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. Some reached thousands of GitHub stars within days.

The AI Acceleration Factor

Thomas says he hasn’t written much code by hand since February. Claude Opus 5.5 handled the heavy lifting. The process followed clean-room rules. No decompilation of Adobe binaries. No copying of proprietary code. Public documentation, observed behavior, and lots of AI agent hours instead.

Project roadmaps quantify the gap. EffectCraft sits near 94% on some weighted measures. PrintCraft lags at 35%, missing a full PDF renderer. PhotoCraft, the flagship, reports all 625 Photoshop menu items wired to commands. Real-world usability tells another story. Bugs abound. Features remain incomplete. Professional workflows would break today.

A Gizmodo writer tried PhotoCraft anyway. “It feels like using glitchy, but real, Photoshop,” the reviewer noted. For occasional users tired of Adobe’s monthly fees, that might suffice. Serious professionals will wait. (Gizmodo, Oct. 8, 2026)

But the demonstration carries weight. Complex creative tools once demanded massive teams and years of effort. Now one person plus a strong language model produced working approximations in days. The repositories even expose command interfaces, CLI access, JSON channels, and MCP protocol support so AI agents can drive the software directly.

Thomas promises dedicated support. A team with filmmaking software experience will handle bugs and feature requests. Community input will accelerate progress. “If you’re worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn’t,” he told readers.

Adobe built its dominance over decades. Creative Cloud generates billions in annual revenue. The subscription model shifted power from users to the company. Many creatives resent the recurring cost, the forced updates, the occasional dark patterns around cancellation.

Alternatives existed before. GIMP. Krita. DaVinci Resolve for video. Affinity’s one-time purchase apps. None matched Adobe’s full feature depth or file compatibility perfectly. None carried the same ecosystem momentum.

ArtCraft tries a different angle. Familiar interfaces. Native performance. Open code. Built-in AI tools. Cross-platform from day one. And that agent-friendly architecture. Future AI workflows could edit photos, composite video, or layout documents without human mouse clicks.

Legal questions hover. Clean-room reimplementations generally pass muster. Trade dress claims could arise if the look and feel copies Adobe too closely. Interface elements, icons, even specific tool behaviors might invite scrutiny. Thomas insists no source code was touched. Observers note the project’s transparency but warn lawyers may still knock.

Eric S. Raymond, open source advocate, reacted sharply. “Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead,” he posted. Others tempered the hype. The apps remain early alpha. Performance varies. Stability needs work. File format support, especially for complex PSDs or Premiere projects, falls short of production needs.

Yet the signal feels unmistakable. AI coding agents compress development timelines dramatically. What took armies now takes individuals. What cost millions now costs compute credits. Software incumbents face pressure not just from better funded rivals but from determined solo developers armed with frontier models.

Thomas envisions more. He sees a future where creatives get the best tools without rent-seeking intermediaries. Free. Open. Extensible. Improved by the very AI systems that helped create them.

Skeptics point to maintenance. Security updates. Complex edge cases in professional pipelines. Adobe’s decades of refinement cover countless workflows. Replicating that depth takes more than menu parity. It takes real usage, real feedback, real iteration under fire.

Still. The genie left the bottle. Repositories sit public. Stars accumulate. Developers experiment. Some already fork. Others integrate the command layer into their own AI pipelines.

Adobe declined comment in initial coverage. The company likely monitors closely. Its stock reflects investor belief in moats around data, cloud integration, and brand. Those moats may prove stronger than interface clones. Or they may not.

Either way, the conversation changed. One bold claim. Seven repositories. A provocative slogan. “Software is over,” Thomas declared in an earlier comment. He followed with a boast. He had “one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing.”

Hyperbole, sure. But the proof sits on GitHub for anyone to download and test. The code compiles. The windows open. The tools respond. Imperfectly. Yet they exist.

That fact alone forces reflection across the industry. On pricing. On development velocity. On what closed source can defend when AI agents rewrite the economics overnight.

Thomas and his team keep pushing. New commits appear. Bugs get fixed. Features arrive. The gap narrows. Creatives watch. So does Adobe. So does everyone wondering what other mature software categories might face the same treatment next.