Did AI clone Adobe? What the ArtCraft case teaches about the value of software

What happened

On September 30, 2026, ArtCraft, a creative tools studio founded by American developer Brandon Thomas, began publishing a series of free, open-source apps on GitHub. In the following days, the project went viral with a bold promise: to offer alternatives to Adobe's main programs.

• ✓PhotoCraft, an image editor, in place of Photoshop.
• ✓VectorCraft, vector illustration, in place of Illustrator.
• ✓FilmCraft, video editing, in place of Premiere Pro.
• ✓LightCraft, photo developing and cataloging, in place of Lightroom.
• ✓EffectCraft, animation and effects, in place of After Effects.
• ✓DesignCraft, page layout, in place of InDesign.
• ✓PdfCraft (launched as PrintCraft), for PDFs, in place of Acrobat.

Who is behind it and how the apps were made

According to TechSpot, Thomas said he wrote the apps in Rust with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's model, cited Adobe's cancellation fees as motivation and summed up the moment with the phrase "software is over". Since then, ArtCraft's official page has started listing similar apps for spreadsheets, presentations, audio and CAD.

The case became the symbol of a bigger discussion about reverse engineering with AI, which gained momentum the same week with REA, a tool that puts AI agents to work analyzing compiled programs.

Are the apps copies of Adobe?

Not in the sense of using Adobe's code, according to the project itself. The PhotoCraft repository describes it as a clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop, built only from public specifications and the program's observed behavior, with no Adobe code, shaders or files, and states it has no affiliation with the company. The license is MIT or Apache-2.0, at the user's choice.

Clean room is an old method: one team studies and documents the original product's behavior, and another, which has never seen its code, writes a new implementation from that documentation. That's how the IBM PC BIOS was recreated in the 1980s. In ArtCraft's case, that's the developer's claim; as of this writing, we found no independent verification.

What already works and what's missing

Here the gap between headline and product shows. The README of PhotoCraft, the most mature app in the series, says it's in alpha and doesn't yet replace Photoshop in day-to-day professional work. The biggest gaps the project itself points out are generative AI features, missing tools, typography depth and plug-in compatibility. The other apps are listed as alpha or in development on the official page.

Developer Fabio Akita's analysis adds problems that only show up in real use: hundreds of open issues in the repository, limited color management for print (CMYK and ICC profiles), high memory use on very large images and incompatibilities with PSD files. In short: the screenshot impresses, and the product is still under construction.

Why Adobe's software doesn't fit in a clone

The most interesting point of the case isn't what ArtCraft did, but what it can't do, no matter how many tokens it spends. Much of the value of modern software isn't in the installed program:

• ✓Cloud services: features such as Photoshop's generative fill are processed on Adobe's servers.
• ✓Accumulated data: camera and lens profiles and decades of color science.
• ✓Licenses and partnerships: Pantone left Adobe's free libraries in 2022, and cinema camera color transforms come through contracts with the manufacturers.
• ✓Constant evolution: a product sold by subscription changes every week, and the clone has to keep chasing it.

The lesson for those who sell software

If your product is mainly a set of screens and forms that anyone can see working, it got cheaper to copy. Not through reverse engineering of the code, but because AI lowered the cost of writing similar software. What remains hard to copy:

• ✓Proprietary data: the history, customer base and accumulated knowledge only your product has.
• ✓Server-side services: what happens off the user's device can't be taken apart.
• ✓Integration with the customer's process: the more embedded the product is in the operation, the higher the cost of switching.
• ✓Relationship and support: trust, service and onboarding don't come out of a repository.
• ✓Speed: whoever evolves the product every week keeps the clone one step behind.

The lesson for those who buy software

The case also shows the other side: building custom tools got cheaper. For many companies, the question is no longer "which system do I subscribe to?" but "is it worth having our own tool for this process?".

The answer depends on the total cost, not just the license: maintenance, security, support and team training all count. A free, open app can turn out expensive if nobody in the company knows how to maintain it. It's the kind of comparison we run in our AI consulting, in the tool selection track, and, when custom pays off, in our custom AI agents.