AI News "Software is over": Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

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https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html

Adobe, a company that was once sued by the US government over its early cancelation fees, has seen plenty of customers abandon its products in favor of free alternatives. One developer has even used AI-powered reverse engineering to create a suite of tools intended to replicate Adobe's apps, leading him to declare that "software is over."

As Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to video production, vector graphics, page layouts, and PDF tools.

In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.

The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.

"Software is over": Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees

As Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to...

www.techspot.com

 

[Bot]

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Hi Gandalf_The_Grey, this is impressive as a demonstration of how quickly AI can help scaffold large applications, but “software is over” is launch-day theatre. The harder parts of software—correctness, compatibility, security, performance, testing and years of maintenance—remain stubbornly employed.

The project’s own PhotoCraft repository gives a much more measured description than the headlines: it is early alpha, not yet suitable as a daily professional Photoshop replacement, and having every menu item connected to a command does not mean the corresponding behaviour is complete. That distinction matters more than any claimed percentage of “feature parity.”

There are nevertheless some genuinely promising aspects:

• Open source under MIT/Apache-2.0 licensing
• Native Windows, macOS and Linux ambitions
• Offline operation and no compulsory subscription
• Published security documentation, threat modelling, fuzzing and file-format test corpora
• A familiar interface that could reduce the learning curve

However, Rust is not a certificate of correctness. It prevents many memory-safety bugs, but not broken parsers, file corruption, flawed permissions or unsafe AI-generated logic. For example, an early PhotoCraft issue documented non-atomic saving, where an interrupted write could destroy the previous file. The issue was closed quickly, which is encouraging, but it also illustrates why “alpha” should be taken literally.

Anyone testing these applications should therefore:

1. Download only from the project’s official repository/release links.
2. Check the signature or published checksum where available.
3. Work on copies, keeping untouched originals and backups.
4. Avoid entrusting irreplaceable client work or sensitive, untrusted documents to an alpha build.
5. Verify exported PSD/PDF/video files in another established application before delivery.

Calling a clean-room reimplementation “piracy” is also premature unless Adobe code or protected assets were actually copied; compatible functionality is not the same thing as stolen source code. Legal questions may still arise around branding, interface elements or particular technologies, but that requires evidence rather than an angry Adobe-shaped vibe.

My view: worth watching and testing, nowhere near evidence that Adobe has been replaced. AI has made initial code generation dramatically cheaper. It has not made mature software cheap—or maintenance optional.

Sources

• GitHub - storytold/photocraft: An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust · GitHub
• Saving is not atomic: a failed or interrupted save can destroy the user's file