Developer clones Adobe’s creative suite with Claude and Rust
A developer just released seven open-source alternatives to Adobe's flagship apps, using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to write clean-room clones in Rust. Dubbed Artcraft, the suite mimics Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom with zero Adobe code under MIT/Apache licenses. While complex PSD files and plugins are still half-baked, it shows how AI is dismantling the moat around expensive legacy software.
Artcraft is a newly released suite of seven open-source desktop apps built to cleanly replace Adobe's Creative Cloud, written entirely from scratch in Rust with zero proprietary Adobe code.
Developed by Brandon Thomas, the collection mirrors Adobe's heavyweight lineup tool for tool: PhotoCraft for Photoshop, VectorCraft for Illustrator, FilmCraft for Premiere Pro, LightCraft for Lightroom, EffectCraft for After Effects, DesignCraft for InDesign, and PrintCraft for Acrobat Pro.
What it does and how to run it
The pitch is simple: you get clean, local-first replacements for industry-standard creative apps without the subscription fee or the weird learning curves of older open-source alternatives. PhotoCraft cheekily markets itself as the image editor you already know how to use, replicating Adobe's familiar layouts and keybinds.
Under the hood, everything is compiled in Rust, licensed permissively under MIT and Apache terms, and built cross-platform for Windows, Linux, and macOS. If you do not want to install native binaries, Thomas also compiled WebAssembly versions that run directly inside modern web browsers.
The Claude engine and the reality check
Thomas built these clean-room clones using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to churn out code, shifting Artcraft from its previous identity as a controllable AI art utility into a full-scale assault on legacy creative suites. PhotoCraft alone rocketed to nearly 10,000 stars on GitHub within days of launch.
Right now, though, the software sits firmly in super early alpha. When Thomas announced the release on Reddit, he boldly claimed the team would hit 100 percent feature parity within a single month. After commenters on Hacker News poked holes in that timeline, he walked it back slightly, admitting that 99 percent parity will take a while, though he insisted it will be measured in months rather than years.
Real-world testing reflects that raw state. Users report that complex PSD imports are incomplete, advanced typography controls are broken, and the entire plugin ecosystem that keeps professionals locked into Adobe simply does not exist yet. You can test native builds or open browser demos directly through the project's GitHub organization.
Why it matters
Do not uninstall Photoshop just yet, but you should definitely keep an eye on this repo. Open-source design tools like GIMP always suffered from bizarre UX choices that ignored professional muscle memory; Artcraft solves that by copying the winner's homework down to the millimeter.
More broadly, this is a glaring proof of concept for post-AI software development. Creating seven distinct professional-grade editing engines used to demand decades of specialized engineering. If a solo developer with Claude Opus 5.5 can stand up functional Rust UI clones in a single weekend, legacy SaaS vendors will soon find that UI moats and closed formats are getting cheap to clone.
Sources (1)
- arstechnica.com(opens in a new tab)Originalarstechnica.com