Overview
- Brandon Thomas published seven Artcraft apps that mimic Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro and made the source code public under MIT and Apache licenses.
- The developer says he built the Rust-written, WebAssembly-capable apps with heavy AI help and specifically named Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 as part of his workflow.
- Thomas plans to keep the apps free while selling token-based access to Artcraft’s visual AI model and integrated IDE to pay for ongoing engineering and bug bounties.
- The release is an early alpha with widespread reports of missing features and bugs, and Thomas has scaled back an initial prediction of one-month parity with Adobe’s products.
- Journalists and legal observers warn the project could face trade-dress risk if its interfaces too closely copy Adobe’s look, and the launch tests whether AI tools can rapidly lower the cost of recreating paid software.