Artcraft, a project that began as a controllable AI tool for artists, has pivoted to releasing seven open-source applications that mimic the interfaces and tools of Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. Developer Brandon Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create what he describes as clean-room replacements, written in Rust with WebAssembly versions for browsers.
Thomas has made bold promises about the software's trajectory, claiming on Reddit that the "super early alpha" apps would reach 100% feature parity within a month. Days later he softened that to "99% parity" taking months rather than years. The article notes that commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have pointed out many current limitations, contrasting Thomas's confidence with their skepticism.
Thomas says the free, MIT/Apache-licensed apps will be funded by selling token-based access to Artcraft's existing visual AI model and IDE, which is also offered as an image-generation option inside the apps. He frames the project as part of a broader push to replace proprietary software with AI-generated open equivalents, though the article cautions that the apps could still face legal trouble if their look and feel too closely copies Adobe's trade dress.