ArtCraft releases open-source Rust clones of seven Adobe apps
Event Brief generated 45 s read
Written by an AI. It was merged from the 4 sources on this page and has not been reviewed by a person.
The short version
- Seven apps, from PhotoCraft (Photoshop) to DesignCraft (InDesign), written from scratch in Rust.
- Thomas says he built them with Claude Opus 5.5 and calls them a clean-room reimplementation.
- All are pre-alpha and far from feature parity with Adobe's apps.
What happened
Brandon Thomas, founder of ArtCraft and former CEO of Storyteller.ai, released free, open-source clones of seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps on October 3, Techstrong.ai reports. They are PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign) and PrintCraft (Acrobat). Notebookcheck says each was written from scratch in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5 as the coding model. They run on Windows, macOS and Linux and in the browser. ArtCraft has since added Word, PowerPoint, Excel and AutoCAD look-alikes.
Why it might matter
Thomas calls it a clean-room reimplementation that uses no Adobe code. If small teams can rebuild large proprietary suites this way, pricing pressure on subscription software could grow. ArtCraft is funded by selling credits for AI image and video models, from $8 a month; the apps themselves need no subscription.
What we don’t know yet
The apps are pre-alpha. Thomas first promised full feature parity within a month on Reddit, then told Hacker News 99% within months. Adobe has not commented, and the legal standing of AI-made clean-room clones is untested.
