Artcraft has released seven open-source creative applications that imitate the interfaces and broad roles of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. The programs are written in Rust, with WebAssembly versions that run in a browser.
Developer Brandon Thomas says he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to create the clean-room replacements without copying Adobe’s source code. The applications are available under MIT and Apache licenses. Artcraft plans to fund continued development by selling access to its existing image-generation model and development environment.
The release demonstrates how coding models can reduce the labor needed to reproduce a familiar application structure. It does not yet deliver a full substitute for Adobe’s mature products. Thomas describes the software as a “super early alpha,” and early users have identified many missing or incomplete features. His initial promise of complete parity within a month was later softened to near-parity over months.
Clean-room reimplementation can be lawful, but copying a product’s distinctive visual presentation too closely may create trade-dress disputes. The project’s real test will be whether its small team can move beyond generated scaffolding to compatibility, stability, performance and long-term maintenance.