AI reverse-engineering clones Adobe's Creative Cloud for free

A developer says he used an AI model to reverse-engineer Adobe's Creative Cloud apps and rebuild them as free, open-source clones with nearly identical interfaces. Brandon Thomas and his team launched the clones, branded Artcraft, in early October, promising a "one-to-one replacement for Creative Cloud apps" that are "free [with] no subscription, and you own the source code," as the team put it on Reddit. For a subscription-software industry built on lock-in, that pitch lands directly on its most sensitive nerve.

The stakes are straightforward. Free alternatives to Adobe's products — GIMP for Photoshop, Darktable for Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve for Premiere — have existed for decades and never broke Adobe's grip, because most users refuse to pay the switching costs of learning a new interface after years of muscle memory. Artcraft's bet is that cloning the interface itself removes that barrier. If it works, the moat around every established subscription app narrows.

Why did a developer clone Adobe's apps?

Thomas's motivation was personal, and he stated it bluntly. He decided to reverse engineer the Creative Cloud apps after getting "bit by [Adobe's]... dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times," he wrote on Hacker News. To build the clones, he used Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean room... pure Rust" versions of each app — meaning no Adobe source code was copied — which he claims are more performant than the originals.

The claim deserves scrutiny, and hands-on testing gives it partial support. I tried the Photoshop replacement, called Photocraft. It lacks AI features and other advanced capabilities, but it handles resizing, masking and color adjustments, and its menus and controls map almost one-to-one onto Photoshop's, so there is no learning curve. It is not a substitute for power users. For many ordinary subscribers, it may be good enough.

The bugs are real, though. Users have reported critical defects in Photocraft, including the app deleting images, randomly merging layers and lacking stability. It also cannot open native PSD Photoshop files, which blocks existing Adobe users from migrating their work. A clone that cannot read its predecessor's file format is, for now, a clone with a locked front door.

Thomas frames this as more than a grudge against one company. "Software is over... AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-sh***y era," he said. That is a mission statement, not a product roadmap, and it leaves unanswered how a free project sustains years of maintenance.

Can anyone reverse engineer software now?

The Artcraft team consists of experienced coders, but a second project suggests the skill floor is dropping fast. An application called REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) has gone viral over recent weeks, accumulating 87,000 forks and 346,000 stars on GitHub as of October 20. It deconstructs software and rebuilds it in clean, new code, more automatically than the manual clean-room process Thomas used.

"It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project," REA's GitHub description states. That description covers not just desktop and smartphone software but firmware inside consumer devices — TVs, refrigerators, musical instruments and smart frames. If the tool performs as described, the boundary between "commercial product" and "reproducible artifact" thins considerably.

Games are already deep inside this territory. Recent community feats include full decompilations of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Metroid Prime. The shift has consequences for the human side of the craft: decomp.dev, a website dedicated to human-led reverse engineering of games, recently announced it is shutting down because AI-driven decompilation has overrun the community, as 404 Media reported. The automation is not a forecast; it has already displaced the specialists who pioneered the practice.

What has the reaction been?

Opinion splits sharply. One Reddit commenter, who had built Photoshop file readers and writers in the past, acknowledged the difficulty of what Artcraft pulled off: "Having built Photoshop readers/writers in the past, I know the challenge just in dealing with the file format. Then you have the sheer amount of UI/UX to implement well. And this looks exceptionally well-executed."

The criticism is equally direct. "What rubbish, this codebase will be unmaintainable in a few months," one critic wrote on X, arguing the developers lack understanding of the concepts behind the apps. Another user who tried Photocraft called it "utter AI-driven slop" that "blatantly infringed" on Adobe's trademarks and copyrights. Both objections — maintainability and legality — are the two load-bearing questions this project has not answered.

Is this legal?

The legal exposure is substantial, and the Artcraft team has not resolved it. The team says it never used a single line of Adobe's code, which addresses copyright infringement on the code itself. But cloning an app's interface and functionality may still violate Photoshop's trademarks and patents, along with those of other cloned apps. Adobe's terms of use also explicitly ban reverse engineering of its software to determine how it works — a contractual bar that applies regardless of what was copied. Clean-room technique protects against one legal theory, not all of them, and no court has tested this fact pattern yet.

The unresolved legal questions around patents and copyright are a direct product of AI's speed. Regulators and courts have not caught up with a world where any individual can decompile, reconstruct and redistribute an app in weeks.

What happens next?

Artcraft and REA have opened a box that will not close. A single person skilled with AI can now potentially accomplish what previously took a team of engineers. That capability will produce countless low-quality, "slop"-filled apps, and it may also force companies like Adobe to rethink the subscription models that motivated the cloning in the first place. Adobe's response — legal, pricing, or product — will signal whether incumbents treat this as piracy or as competition they cannot sue out of existence.