Developer pledges 100% Adobe app parity in a month with AI‑built clones
Brandon Thomas, the creator behind Artcraft, unveiled a new open‑source suite that replicates the user interfaces and tools of Adobe’s flagship products—including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. He announced the seven apps on Reddit, explaining that he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to generate “clean‑room replacements” written in Rust,…
What you can do with it
AI at Work →Create Adobe-style graphics using open-source Artcraft suite
Provides open-source replacements for Adobe’s major creative apps.
- Who for
- marketers
- Cost
- free
- Effort
- minutes
Use it for
- Design graphics
- Edit videos
- Create layouts
Watch out Still early alpha; many features missing
Key points from the news
- Developer Brandon Thomas announced a suite of seven open‑source apps that mimic Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
- Thomas used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to generate clean‑room replacements in Rust, with WebAssembly builds available for browsers.
- He claims the “super early alpha” will reach 100% feature parity within a month, later adjusting to 99% parity over months.
Thomas described the current release as a “super early alpha” but promised rapid progress, initially saying the suite would reach 100% feature parity within a month. A few days later he softened the claim, noting that 99% parity would take “a while” but should be measured in months rather than years. Commenters on Hacker News have already highlighted numerous shortcomings, while the community is invited to report bugs and suggest features.
If the project delivers on its roadmap, creators could gain free, community‑maintained alternatives to costly Adobe software, potentially lowering barriers for designers, marketers and small businesses that rely on creative tools.
Model page: Claude Opus 5.5 →
“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones
Ars Technica AI · 7 October 2026
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This text was published by Ars Technica AI and written by Kyle Orland. It is reproduced here with attribution so you can read it in full; the rights remain with the publisher. Read it at the source ↗
Coverage and discussion
1source- Hacker News discussion · 10 pointsnews.ycombinator.com
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