Dev rebuilds 7 Adobe apps in Rust with Opus 5.5 — hands-on finds them far from ready
A developer who describes himself as a 15-year industry veteran used Claude Opus 5.5 to help recreate Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, After Effects and InDesign in "100% pure native Rust," grouped under the ArtCraft name (PhotoCraft, FilmCraft and others). The apps are free, multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux and web), and tiny — around 80–90MB versus 6.4GB for Photoshop — but TechRadar's hands-on found PhotoCraft can't open HEIC files, has flaky selection tools and only saves as JPG, while FilmCraft can't drag-trim clips and plays back audio as loud static. With PhotoCraft at version 0.20 and FilmCraft at 0.2.1, the reviewer concludes they are nowhere near ready and recommends established free alternatives such as DaVinci Resolve for now.
It shows AI-assisted coding now lets a single developer attempt to rebuild major creative software, though feature completeness and stability remain the real barriers.
An AI developer has taken on Adobe, the undisputed 800-lbs gorilla of the creative software space. Announcing the 'launch' over on Reddit, the "a 15-year industry veteran" explained that he used Opus 5.5 to help "recreate 7 of the top Adobe apps in 100% pure native Rust".
Adobe's all-consuming subscriptions seems to be the main reason for recreating Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, After Effects, and InDesign using the modern programming language.
That's something I can fully appreciate. After all, what if you’re not a fan of their business practices, like charging you a fair chunk of change every month to be able to use their software, and the moment you stop paying, you can no longer work on your files and projects?
So, of course, I just had to check out how it compares to Adobe's own creative suite.
ArtCraft: New apps for the same job
The ArtCraft names are pretty self-explanatory: PhotoCraft is for images, LightCraft for image cataloguing, VectorCraft for vectors, DesignCraft for desktop publishing, FilmCraft for filmmaking, EffectCraft for creating special effects, and PrintCraft is for working with PDFs.
#ArtCraft#PhotoCraft#FilmCraft#Adobe#Photoshop#Premiere Pro#Claude Opus 5.5#Rust