“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones

Developer Brandon Thomas has debuted a suite of seven open source applications under his Artcraft brand that recreate the user interfaces and tools of Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. The pivot to the app suite was announced on Reddit earlier this week, following Artcraft's prior life as a "controllable AI for artists" offering precise post-generation editing of AI-generated images and videos.

Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build what he calls "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software, written in Rust with WebAssembly versions that run in a browser. The apps are released under MIT/Apache licenses at no cost. Thomas, who says he has roughly a decade of experience on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was motivated by encountering a "cancellation fee" dark pattern too many times. Development will be funded by selling token-based access to Artcraft's existing visual AI model and IDE, offered inside the apps alongside third-party models; Thomas said this ensures the apps won't become "some orphaned small-team project" and that a team building software for filmmakers supports them.

The apps are currently described by Thomas as a "super early alpha," and commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have pointed to many current shortcomings. Thomas initially stated on Reddit that feature parity would reach 100 percent within a month, then amended that days later on Hacker News to say "99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years." Reverse engineering — replicating software functionality without copying code — has generally been found legally acceptable, though the report notes the ArtCraft apps could face legal trouble if their "trade dress" too closely mimics Adobe's appearance and interface. Thomas said that after coding exclusively with AI tools since February, he foresees everyday developers recreating open source versions of paid software; he wrote that "software is over" and claimed to have "one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing."

Why it matters: The free, MIT/Apache-licensed apps give developers and teams a browser-capable, Rust-based alternative to Adobe's paid suite, while the promised parity timeline remains an early-alpha target rather than a shipped result, and the interface's resemblance to Adobe's could invite trade dress claims.