Developer uses Claude Opus 5.5 to build seven open-source Adobe clones
Brandon Thomas, a former Square engineer, announced on Reddit that ArtCraft has released a suite of seven open-source Rust apps modeled on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro, with MIT or Apache-2.0 licenses and some WebAssembly browser builds. Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create clean-room replacements, and the apps expose CLI, JSON and MCP interfaces for AI agents. The software is described as a very early alpha: Thomas initially promised 100% feature parity within a month and later said 99% would take months, while testers reported basic bugs and commenters raised legal and safety concerns.
The project shows a small team using Claude Opus 5.5 to attempt clean-room recreations of seven Adobe apps, while early testers report the alpha software still has major functional gaps.
For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe's Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe's well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.
Artcraft got its start last year as a "controllable AI for artists" that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings, Thomas makes the grandiose promise that the current "super early alpha" state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.
#ArtCraft#Brandon Thomas#Anthropic#Claude Opus 5.5#Adobe#Adobe Photoshop#Adobe Illustrator#Adobe Premiere#Adobe Lightroom#Adobe After Effects#Adobe InDesign#Adobe Acrobat Pro