Developer Brandon Thomas has launched the Artcraft initiative, which uses AI to create open-source, free alternatives to Adobe software. The project aims to replicate the interface and functionality of seven major applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
The software is written in Rust and includes a WebAssembly version for browser-based use. Thomas utilizes the Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 model to generate the code. While currently in an early alpha stage, the developer aims to achieve 99 percent feature parity with Adobe products within a few months.
The project is funded by selling access to the Artcraft visual AI model and IDE. The resulting applications are distributed under MIT and Apache licenses. Thomas, who has approximately ten years of experience with large-scale Rust projects, initiated this work in response to Adobe's subscription cancellation policies.
While reverse engineering software is generally legal, experts note potential risks regarding Adobe's intellectual property if the interface design too closely mimics the original products. Thomas intends for this initiative to empower developers to create open-source alternatives to major commercial software.
