AI-Built Open Source Clones Take Aim at Adobe's Entire Creative Suite

A single software developer has released seven open source applications that recreate the user interfaces and tools of Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro — and he says he built them with AI, in Rust, as what he calls "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software.

The developer, Brandon Thomas, announced the suite on Reddit earlier this week. In his post, he said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to write the code, with WebAssembly versions available so the apps can run in a browser. The apps are published under the Artcraft brand, which debuted the pivot to a seven-app suite over the weekend.

Thomas's framing is unusually blunt. He describes the current releases as a "super early alpha" state, but he promises that this starting point will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever shipped.

What exactly has been released?

The Artcraft suite consists of seven open source applications, each named after the Adobe product it recreates:

• A Photoshop clone
• An Illustrator clone
• A Premiere clone
• A Lightroom clone
• An After Effects clone
• An InDesign clone
• An Acrobat Pro clone

Each app mirrors the look, feel, and functionality of its Adobe counterpart. Thomas says the goal is fidelity — recreating the user interface and tools of software that professional designers, photographers, and video editors have used for decades. The code lives on GitHub, and the WebAssembly builds lower the barrier to trying the apps: no installation, just a browser.

The technical choices matter here. Rust is a systems programming language known for performance and memory safety, not a typical choice for graphics and creative tooling, where C++ dominates. WebAssembly compilation means the same codebase can target desktop and browser environments. And the "clean-room" label is a legal term of art: it suggests the code was written from scratch based on observed behavior of the original products, rather than copied from Adobe's source.

Where did Artcraft come from?

Artcraft did not start as an Adobe challenger. The brand launched last year as a "controllable AI for artists" — a tool for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. The pivot to a full application suite is a sharp strategic turn, announced on the Artcraft site over the weekend and then taken to Reddit and Hacker News.

That origin explains the project's logic. Thomas's bet is that AI-assisted development has made the marginal cost of building a creative application suite collapse. Where Adobe's products represent decades of accumulated engineering, Thomas is arguing that a single developer with a frontier AI model can now replicate enough of that work to compete.

How credible is the claim?

Early users are not convinced. Commenters on Hacker News and on Bluesky have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings. The gap between a "super early alpha" clone and production-grade creative software is enormous, and observers quickly flagged it.

The skepticism is warranted by history. The open source ecosystem already offers several free and open-source alternatives to Adobe's Creative Suite — projects that replicate some or all of Adobe's capabilities and that people seeking to avoid the difficulty and expense of Adobe's subscriptions have used for years. Those projects, built by large communities over long periods, still have not displaced Adobe's dominance in professional workflows. Artcraft enters a market where the incumbent's moat is not merely code volume but file-format compatibility, plugin ecosystems, industry certification, and decades of user habit.

Thomas's counterargument is implicit in his method: if a frontier AI model can generate functional clones quickly, then iteration speed — not accumulated codebase — becomes the deciding factor. The "super early alpha" label is, in his telling, not an apology but a timeline.

Why does this matter for the software industry?

The stakes go well beyond Adobe. If one developer can use Claude Opus 5.5 to produce working, open source replacements for seven major commercial applications, the same approach applies to other categories of expensive, incumbent-dominated software. The economics of commercial software rest on the assumption that building competitive alternatives is slow and expensive. AI-assisted development attacks that assumption directly.

Adobe is a useful first target because its Creative Cloud subscriptions are both expensive and widely resented. Customers frustrated with the cost and lock-in of Adobe's suite have long sought alternatives, and the existing open source options have captured only a fraction of that demand. A faithful, free clone would convert that latent frustration into switching at a scale existing alternatives never achieved.

There is also a legal question that the source does not resolve. Clean-room reverse engineering has an established history in software, but recreating the user interface, look, and feel of commercial products raises trademark and trade dress issues that Adobe has not yet publicly addressed. Whether Adobe responds with lawsuits, product changes, or silence will shape how many similar projects follow.

What are the honest limitations of the current release?

Based on the community's early assessments, the apps are far from Adobe's level today. Thomas himself concedes the "super early alpha" status. The promise — software "just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out" — is a claim about the future, not the present, and it rests entirely on how fast AI-assisted development can close a gap measured in decades of engineering.

The project also depends on a single developer's sustained effort, unless the open source release attracts contributors. Seven applications is a large surface area for one person to maintain, even with AI assistance.

What happens next?

Thomas has committed publicly to iterating the alpha toward full functionality, and the open source release makes community contribution possible. The immediate questions are whether development pace matches his promise, whether Adobe takes legal or competitive action, and whether the Hacker News and Bluesky critics revisit the project in six months to find real progress. If they do, the claim that AI has made cloning commercial software cheap stops being a developer's grandiose promise and starts being a pricing problem for every incumbent software vendor.