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.
AI-assisted coding is compressing complex professional software projects that once required a team into the work of one developer, which could erode the moat of incumbents like Adobe over time.