Brandon Thomas

Headlines · 4

1. 3d
   Developer builds 7 free open-source Adobe alternatives with Claude Opus 5.5

   Software engineer Brandon Thomas has launched ArtCraft, an open-source project that uses Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust language to recreate seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), LightCraft (Lightroom), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign) and PdfCraft (Acrobat), with interfaces and workflows deliberately kept close to Adobe's. TMTPost reports the project has drawn more than 30,000 developer followers and over 100,000 likes on GitHub, and the team lead claims community feedback could bring it to roughly 99% feature parity with Adobe's software within months — a claim that remains unverified. The local editing tools are free and open source, while ArtCraft's cloud AI generation services run on credits and paid plans; reviewers at TechRadar and Creative Bloq found gaps in PhotoCraft's file-format support and saving, LightCraft's color management and masking, and FilmCraft's audio and editing. Thomas describes the code as clean-room implementations, though the similar interfaces and interaction patterns could raise intellectual-property questions.

   钛媒体 · 🔥 8
2. 5d
   REA: AI-powered reverse engineering project fuels debate over rebuilding software

   An analysis piece examines the GitHub open-source project REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), whose star count passed 110,000 as of October 12. Developer Brandon Thomas says he used AI to build seven Adobe alternatives and declared "Software is over"; REA connects to analysis tools such as Ghidra, Hopper and IDA, handles JavaScript, Electron apps and websites, and can work with agents like Claude Code and Codex to trace data flows and rewrite code. Cited cases include an Aegis verification-code reimplementation whose output matched the original in 133 tests, and a DX-Ball sound function that matched across 3,205 tests and produced 63 bytes of matching machine code under a specified old compiler. The article also covers browser ports of games such as Halo and GTA: Vice City, and VibeOffice, which brings an Office 2003-style interface to the browser.

   虎嗅 AI · 🔥 0
3. 5d
   Developer vibe-codes open-source Word, Excel, PowerPoint clones with Claude

   Brandon Thomas, the developer behind ArtCraft — a set of free, open-source replacements for Adobe's creative apps — released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft on October 13, targeting Word, Excel and PowerPoint respectively. The three apps are written in Rust with help from Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, are offered under MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses, run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD, and also work in browsers via WebAssembly from a single Rust codebase without Electron or Tauri. Per the GitHub pages, WordCraft reads and writes .docx along with .odt, .rtf, .html, .md and .txt, and supports styles, tables, track changes, spell/grammar check and mail merge; the developer says GridCraft already implements about 89% of Excel's ribbon and menu commands and roughly 98% of its worksheet functions; DeckCraft opens and saves .pptx and exports to PDF or images. Coverage and Reddit discussion note the apps remain early-stage: some call them "AI slop" and question whether one developer can keep up with fixes and upgrades, while Thomas says he has 15 years of coding experience and argues there is "no reason to save broken software" such as LibreOffice or GIMP.

   Tom’s Hardware · 🔥 0
4. 6d
   ArtCraft's AI-built Adobe suite clones go viral, but parity is far off

   Developer Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft, a suite of seven free, locally run, open-source Rust replacements for Adobe tools corresponding to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign; he says he built them with Claude Opus 5.5, and the repositories are open on GitHub. The project spread quickly on Reddit, but his early promise of full feature parity within a month has repeatedly slipped, and he later said near-parity may take months; five of the seven apps are still marked “in development,” with PhotoCraft and the PDF tool labeled “early alpha.” Testers report that PhotoCraft struggles with PSD files containing smart objects, runs slowly on ordinary professional files and throws frequent small errors, while FilmCraft reportedly crashes when importing many video clips; repository tests reportedly match only 5 of 30 cases where PhotoCraft must recompute Photoshop's filter output.

   虎嗅 AI · 🔥 0

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