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.
It shows how AI coding can make software look finished far sooner, while the compatibility and edge cases that mature software accumulated over decades remain much harder to reproduce.