A couple of days ago, I nearly fell off my chair when I read Joey Sneddon’s report. Then, Futurism mentioned the news. I expected global hysteria, yet no such thing happened. Are people that dumb, or am I overreacting? Is it a sign of the approaching apocalypse, or just a spectacular project with little relevance?

Here’s the news: PhotoCraft is an open-source, AI-built clone of Photoshop. Futurism puts it differently, making some unsubstantiated claims: Adobe in Trouble After Someone Reverse-Engineered Adobe Creative Suite and Released It as Open Source. This was not reverse engineering.

What happened is that Brandon Thomas from Atlanta, Georgia, has founded ArtCraft and, with copious help from Anthropic’s Claude, started reimplementing a number of clones of Adobe’s main products! (And not only Adobe’s.)

The Gates of Hell

Seven apps. One craft. The website is the epitome of today’s fucked-up web design, where they couldn’t leave anything alone, not even the scrollbar. I should have installed a JS blocker to see if there’s still anything shown in my browser from their shitty website.

“Join the Discord.” They cannot have a forum or something. Nope. They have a Discord channel. All retards use Discord.

#AppTaglineEquivalentHomeGitHub
01PhotoCraftThe image editor you already know how to use.PhotoshopHomeGitHub
02VectorCraftVector illustration, reimagined in pure Rust.IllustratorHomeGitHub
03FilmCraftProfessional video editing, rebuilt from scratch.PremiereHomeGitHub
04LightCraftYour photos. Your pixels. Your machine.LightroomHomeGitHub
05PdfCraftThe open-source PDF workbench.AcrobatHomeGitHub
06EffectCraftMotion graphics and visual effects, in pure Rust.After EffectsHomeGitHub
07DesignCraftPage layout and publishing, rebuilt in pure Rust.InDesignHomeGitHub

Not only Adobe is under attack! More stuff is in progress (only Paul Thurrott noticed these other apps):

AppDescriptionGitHub
WordCraftAn open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust.GitHub
GridCraftAn open-source, clean-room spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel-style) in pure Rust.GitHub
DeckCraftPresentations and slide shows: an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft PowerPoint in pure Rust.GitHub
CADCraftComputer-aided design and drafting — an open-source, clean-room AutoCAD-style app in pure Rust.GitHub
SoundCraftAn open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools in pure Rust.GitHub

Rust is God, reinvented.

Is this the Road to Hell?

I have to admit that I only tried a couple of them, and only on Windows. I didn’t want to taint my Debian installation, and the other Linux machine is low-spec. Alphabetically:

  • designcraft-0.4.0-windows-x64.msi installed the app without providing any feedback and without asking anything. Bad practice. designcraft-0.4.0-windows-x64-portable.zip also worked, but it’s in early development stages. Even the About box is disabled.
  • pdfcraft-0.4.0-windows-x64.msi and pdfcraft-0.4.0-windows-x64-portable.zip both worked, but this is very far from a finished product.
  • photocraft-0.5.0-windows-x64.msi installed the app silently. photocraft-0.5.0-windows-x64-portable.zip worked, and the app seems to be able to do a number of things, but I’m not familiar with Photoshop, and I rarely use GIMP.
  • vectorcraft-0.6.0-windows-x64.msi and vectorcraft-0.7.0-windows-x64.msi installed the app silently. vectorcraft-0.6.0-windows-x64-portable.zip and vectorcraft-0.7.0-windows-x64-portable.zip both worked, and the app seems to be able to do a number of things, but I never used Illustrator, and the last time I used Inkscape was long ago.
  • wordcraft-0.4.0-windows-x64.msi and wordcraft-0.4.0-windows-x64-portable.zip both worked, and the app seems to handle some Word documents, but the rendering is somewhat blurry. Was this because of my 125% scaling? Overriding the DPI handling to be performed by the app didn’t change anything.

At first glance, these apps aren’t anywhere near production quality yet, but their GUIs are fantastic, and the pace of development is unparalleled! The repos for the 7 advertised apps were started on Sept. 30: photocraft, vectorcraft! The newer ones are even more recent: Oct. 6 for wordcraft. This cannot be, right? How was this possible?

Claude is the answer, not 42

The answer is Claude. Or vibecoding.

Before going back to the GitHub repos, let’s take a look at the “About” boxes of a few apps—they’re surprisingly open and honest!

PhotoCraft 0.5.0:

VectorCraft 0.7.0:

WordCraft 0.4.0:

You cannot say that these apps are entirely vibecoded! But given the huge contribution of Claude Opus, Claude Mythos, Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku, and Qwen Flash, the development speed now makes sense. The laurels go to Claude Opus 5.5!

GitHub offers more details to the curious. There are between 14 and 183 contributors to such an app, but the reality is as follows:

  • In all cases, most commits were made by Claude.
  • In most cases, @echelon was second-best by the number of commits.
  • In most cases, most lines were written or deleted by Claude.
  • In some cases, most lines were written or deleted by @echelon, @bflatastic, or Brandon Thomas himself.

And these metrics can be extremely deceitful. Obviously, in any given session, a human might have co-authored the code but left Claude to commit it to GitHub. But even when a developer took charge of the interaction with GitHub themselves, who’s to say that they didn’t use an LLM to implement the features?

Mysteries remain

Regardless of how incomplete these apps are as of yet, there are things I still cannot fathom:

  • How can such an app, written in Rust no less, have such minuscule sizes as 78.7 MiB, 76.8 MiB, 77.2 MiB, 93.5 MiB, and 62.3 MiB?
  • What is the future business model of these apps? While they’re open source and can be forked and whatnot, the real knowledge stays with the very few people (1 to 3) who have coded it with Claude. Someone has spent a lot of money on tokens, and nobody does that if they don’t expect an ROI.
  • These apps are advertised as also having a web-based version. I couldn’t be bothered to even try to understand the artcraft-services architecture, but I suspect that they bet on the web versions as a cash cow.
  • Finally, WTF are you paying for if you currently decide to pay? Take a look at the Pricing page:

Yeah, sure, “ArtCraft can be used without paying for a subscription. You can bring your own compute and third-party subscriptions. We hope you’ll subscribe, though, as that helps accelerate our development.” But WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS THIS?

Paying for the generation of images and videos by AI image and video generators?! So, you write apps that people use to create or edit images or videos BY HAND, but you also RESELL AI TOKENS?! What the fuck is this shit?

Nobody seems really concerned

So far, people seem unaware of the real significance of such a project. It’s understandable for them to be rather busy with Trump, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, the Nobel Peace Prize, the ICC, and the gas prices (so, in brief, with Trump), or with sports, esports, fucking, drinking, binge-watching movies, or maybe reading. But this is fucking shocking, dammit!

I cannot spend my time browsing the web’s slop, and I didn’t search for reactions to this project. 2-3 articles happened to find their way to me, and that was all. Maybe on Monday some news outlets will start commenting on the case. Or maybe not.

I should thank Joey Sneddon for having mentioned PhotoCraft, and also one of his readers, Scotty. These are Scotty’s comments that intrigued me and made me dig a bit into the matter:

One:

ME: Mom can we get photoshop?
MOM: we have Photoshop at home.

First PSD I tried it choked.

Two:

He says he’ll have full PS parity in a month, then he’s going after MSOffice, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks.

Three:

He said he hasn’t written a line of code since February and lets AI test everything. Too busy to use the apps himself. House of mirrors.

He’s also trashing GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape and doesn’t like anything from KDE or GNOME, while using LLMs that trained on their code to build his Adobe clones.

But don’t worry, everything is under control. Super Intelligence can’t do any bad; it can only good happen.

This is actually about how people are using AI.