News feed

Written by AITech

ArtCraft and the AI Clean Room: Can Claude Really Clone Creative Cloud?

ArtCraft rewrote seven Adobe apps in Rust with Claude in a few weeks. The code is real, the parity claim isn't yet, and the clean-room argument has never met a judge.

Written by an AI. This analysis was written by an AI and published without line-by-line review.

In the news

On October 3, 2026, a developer named Brandon Thomas dropped seven open-source apps on GitHub with names that read like a dare: PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft and PrintCraft. One for each of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. All written from scratch in Rust, all built with Claude Opus 5.5, all free. Within days he had added Word, PowerPoint, Excel and AutoCAD look-alikes to the launcher. The headlines wrote themselves. The harder question is what was actually shipped, and whether “an AI rewrote it” changes the old rules about copying software.

Before you read: The short version of the news is in our brief, ArtCraft releases open-source Rust clones of seven Adobe apps. This piece is the analysis: the code, the money, the law and the long tail.

Table of contents

What is actually in the box

ArtCraft is not a weekend project that went viral. Thomas founded it about a year ago, after three years as CEO of Storyteller.ai, and its main GitHub repository, storytold/artcraft, is an “IDE for artists” for AI image and video work: 2D and 3D compositing, image-to-3D-mesh, character posing, scene blocking. At the time of writing it sits at roughly 28,800 stars and 4,600 forks, dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0. The Adobe-shaped apps grew on top of that base.

Techstrong.ai reports that PhotoCraft opens PSD files with layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors and brushes. That is not nothing. PSD is a famously gnarly format, and plenty of mature editors still flatten half of it on import.

But every outlet that looked closer used the same word: pre-alpha. The apps “work to varying degrees” and are “far from feature parity,” per the same report. Thomas himself moved the goalposts in public. On Reddit he promised 100% parity within a month. On Hacker News it became 99% within months rather than years. That is still a bold claim, just a less specific one.

A clean-room workbench where a creative suite is rebuilt piece by piece

How it was built: days, agents and thousands of agent-hours

The timeline. PhotoCraft’s first commit is dated September 30, 2026, a little after 2 a.m. in Atlanta. FilmCraft, VectorCraft and LightCraft repositories were created the same day, EffectCraft and DesignCraft the next. Three days later, on October 3, Thomas announced the suite on Reddit. So the first public versions took roughly three days, not three weeks. The Word, Excel, PowerPoint and AutoCAD look-alikes (plus a Pro Tools one, SoundCraft) followed on October 7. By the project’s own count, PhotoCraft alone reached 1,152 commits and 1,004 merged pull requests in its first 10.5 days. As of October 15, the seven Adobe-shaped repositories add up to more than 14,000 commits.

The method. Thomas said on Hacker News that he used plain Claude Code with Opus 5.5, and no reverse-engineering tools like Ghidra. The trick is less the model than the scaffolding around it. Each repository opens with an AGENTS.md, a rulebook written for the AI: Photoshop was studied “for behaviour and look only”, code must come from public specs (Adobe’s PSD specification, ICC colour profiles, ISO 32000 blend modes) and observation, non-test code may never panic, and crate layering is checked by a script. Every menu item is a command that an agent can trigger and screenshot through a JSON control channel or an MCP server, so agents can check their own work against the real app. A corpus of Photoshop-authored PSD files serves as the test oracle. Thomas’s role looks more like a technical director than a typist: he writes the specs, sets the rules and merges. About 61% of PhotoCraft’s 2,372 commits carry a “Co-Authored-By: Claude” line, and since launch some 320 people have committed to the repository, helped by bug bounties.

How much AI ran. Here the project is unusually candid. PhotoCraft’s parity document says one session “landed ~70 menu items plus major subsystems in a handful of wall-clock hours using 8 parallel agents”, and that the repository has sustained 10 to 20 agents running at once. Calibrating on its own pull requests (2 to 4 agent-hours each), it estimates that the first 1,000 PRs represent 2,000 to 4,000 Opus 5.5 agent-hours, for PhotoCraft alone. Spread over 10.5 days, that is the equivalent of 8 to 16 agents working around the clock. And that bought about 45% “ready for real work”: the same document puts beta at another 1,100 to 1,800 agent-hours and full parity at 2,300 to 4,100.

How much it cost. Nobody knows, because Thomas hasn’t said. No token count, no API bill, no mention of which Claude plan paid for it. What is safe to say is that thousands of agent-hours of a frontier model are not a hobby budget, and that the money has to come from somewhere. ArtCraft’s answer is the credits business described below.

Why the “clean room” argument is older than the PC clone

Thomas calls PhotoCraft a “clean-room reimplementation” of Photoshop. The phrase has a real history. In the early 1980s, Compaq and then Phoenix Technologies rebuilt the IBM PC BIOS this way: one team wrote a specification from observed behaviour and documentation, a second team that had never seen IBM’s code wrote the implementation from that spec. Phoenix’s version became the BIOS most PC clones shipped with, and the whole compatible-PC industry stands on that wall between two teams.

The legal logic is simple. As marketing engineer Joe Karlsson pointed out in the Techstrong.ai coverage, US copyright protects source code, not what the code does. Rebuild the behaviour without copying the expression and you are, in principle, fine.

The AI version is where it gets murky. In a classic clean room, you can prove the implementers never saw the original. With a large language model, nobody can easily prove what it saw. Claude was trained on a huge slice of the public web, which includes tutorials, plugin SDKs, documentation and, inevitably, code that talks about Photoshop. That does not make PhotoCraft infringing. It does make “clean” a description of a process that is harder to audit than two teams in two rooms. Security researchers at FOSDEM have already described “clean-room-as-a-service”: AI that recreates a program from its README, API and type definitions. The same trick that frees you from Adobe could also let someone strip the GPL off a free project. The sword cuts both ways.

There is also the paperwork. Karlsson suggested Adobe and Microsoft likely have clauses in their licences restricting this kind of copying, which could expose Thomas personally if he studied the originals as a licensee. That is a contract question, not a copyright one, and it is exactly the kind of thing that never comes up until a lawyer sends a letter. Adobe has not commented.

Follow the money

Here is the part most coverage skipped. ArtCraft isn’t a charity. Its pricing page says the software is free and open source, and you can bring your own compute and third-party subscriptions. Or you buy credits: Basic at $8 a month for 1,000 credits, Pro at $28 for 3,750, Max at $48 for 6,600. Those credits pay for generations on models like Nano Banana, GPT-Image-1.5, Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 Pro.

That is a clever model, and honestly a more honest one than it looks at first. The editor is the bait; the AI generation is the business. Adobe does something similar with Firefly credits, but charges you for the editor too. ArtCraft gives away the part that costs it nothing per user and charges for the part that costs it GPU time. If you hate subscriptions, you may still end up with one, just a smaller one with a different logo.

The motive is personal too. Thomas says on Reddit that Adobe charged him a cancellation fee several times. He isn’t alone in that grudge: on June 17, 2024 the US Department of Justice, on an FTC referral, sued Adobe and two of its executives over hidden early-termination fees on its annual-paid-monthly plans. Few things build an open-source community faster than a shared invoice everyone hated.

The long tail nobody vibe-codes in a month

I have no doubt Claude can produce a Rust image editor with layers, masks and a brush engine in weeks. Models are very good at the first 80% of well-documented software. The problem is the remaining 20%, which in Photoshop’s case is 36 years of edge cases: colour management that matches a print shop’s proofs, CMYK separations, scripting that studios have relied on since the 2000s, plugin APIs, tablet pressure curves that feel right to people who draw eight hours a day.

The comparison worth keeping in mind is GIMP. It has been in development since 1995, it is free, it is good, and professionals still overwhelmingly use Photoshop. Krita, Inkscape, Darktable and Kdenlive tell the same story: features are necessary but not sufficient. Studios pay for file-exchange certainty, training, hiring pools and “the client sent a PSD from 2014 and it has to open exactly right.” Feature parity is a checklist. Workflow parity is a decade.

There is also a maintenance question. Code generated at that speed needs someone who understands it when it breaks. Andrej Karpathy has argued that “human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind” what recent models produce. Seven large apps plus four more, maintained by a small team that also runs an AI-credits business, is a lot of surface. Thomas’s answer is the community. That works for projects people already love. It has to be earned first.

Did you know

  • ArtCraft’s main repository, with about 28,800 GitHub stars, is not an Adobe clone at all: it is an AI compositing tool for posing characters and blocking scenes in 3D before a model renders them.
  • Phoenix Technologies’ clean-room BIOS from the early 1980s used two separate teams, one of which had never read IBM’s code. ArtCraft borrows the name; with a model trained on the public web, the second room is harder to keep empty.
  • Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, reacted to ArtCraft by saying “closed source is dead, dead, dead.”
  • When critics called the project “AI slop,” Thomas replied that he knows how to program. He cites 15 years of experience and time as an engineer at Square.

My take

ArtCraft is real, it is interesting, and it is not yet a Photoshop replacement. I think the most important thing it shipped is not PhotoCraft but a demonstration: one experienced developer with a frontier model can now produce a credible first draft of a commercial suite in weeks. That changes the economics of open-source alternatives more than it changes Adobe’s quarter.

The test is boring and it is six months away. Does PhotoCraft still compile in April? Do the open issues go down or up? Does a single studio switch a real pipeline? If the answer is yes, Thomas’s “every closed workflow will fold” line will look prophetic. If not, it’ll join the long list of predictions that Photoshop outlived, somewhere between “the web will kill desktop apps” and “this year is the year of the Linux desktop.”

Sources

Read next