Artcraft: AI-coded free clones of Photoshop, Lightroom and more land on GitHub

What this is about

Under the name Artcraft, Atlanta developer Brandon Thomas (Hacker News handle "Echelon") has published free, open-source recreations of well-known Adobe programs on GitHub. According to Gizmodo, they were built with Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust programming language. The lineup includes PhotoCraft (Photoshop), LightCraft (Lightroom), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), VectorCraft (Illustrator), PDFCraft (Acrobat), EffectCraft (After Effects) and Designcraft (InDesign). AppleInsider also lists clones of Microsoft Office and other software: WordCraft, DeckCraft (PowerPoint), GridCraft (Excel), CADCraft (AutoCAD) and SoundCraft (Pro Tools). "Vibe coding" means writing software largely by giving instructions to an AI, rather than typing every line yourself.

What the testers say

XDA Developers tested on Linux. PhotoCraft held up better than the author expected. Object selection, text layers, layer effects, clipping masks, tabs and cropping all worked well. Selection is less precise than in Photoshop and doesn't show refinements in real time, but the author rates it at least on par with Affinity. AI features such as background generation are missing.

LightCraft offers a folder browser and batch editing like Lightroom. Its auto-adjust overdoes contrast and makes shadows too dark. There's no AI denoising, but you can load your own model, such as RawNIND, which Darktable uses. Quality stays well below Lightroom. Automatic lens corrections were missing in the test.

FilmCraft feels unfinished. The context menu has no "Delete", ripple delete sometimes failed, there are fewer transitions, and audio features are limited. Automatic volume adjustment crashed on the first try.

Gizmodo called PhotoCraft "glitchy, but real Photoshop", with commands where you'd expect them. Free Transform was unpredictable. The author found it fresher than Photopea and GIMP.

AppleInsider describes the interface as a "uncanny valley for user interfaces": the toolbar, icons and layers panel look very much like Photoshop. In testing, it saw no suspicious network traffic to outside servers. There is no AI suggestion bar.

Background and motivation

According to Plagiarism Today, the trigger was that Adobe charged Thomas a cancellation fee on his subscription. He announced "Software is over" on Hacker News and claimed to have rebuilt Photoshop "in one commit". On Reddit he calls himself a "15-year industry veteran". Gizmodo cites the "SaaSpocalypse" debate as context, the idea that users will have AI write their software instead of paying for subscriptions. It also mentions Adobe's $150 million settlement after a US lawsuit over subscription practices. Thomas invites developers to contribute and plans to pay bug bounties.

Legal questions

Plagiarism Today sees good odds for Artcraft on copyright: code is protected, not functionality, and Rust code probably shares nothing with Adobe's C++ code. It points to the Google v. Oracle ruling. AppleInsider compares it to the "clean-room" reimplementations of the IBM BIOS. Whether that applies here isn't established, and exactly how development went hasn't been fully disclosed.

Plagiarism Today sees bigger risks in terms of service (which ban studying inputs and outputs to rebuild the system), patents and trademark law (1:1 clones could cause confusion). In practice, even the threat of a lawsuit could make a solo developer give up. AppleInsider also calls copying the interface a point of contention. The open-source license may also be meaningless, since AI-generated code without a human author is probably not protected by copyright.

Our take

Artcraft shows how quickly an AI can produce a convincing-looking program. For everyday work, though, it isn't ready: alpha status, bugs, missing features and an uncertain future. It's interesting for Linux users, since Adobe and Affinity don't support the platform. XDA advises trying it out, but not switching in a hurry. Gizmodo says to be careful with unfamiliar software if you do try it. Plagiarism Today places Artcraft in the "second 90 percent" of development, which decides between success and footnote.