Adobe spent decades building Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom into the tools that creative professionals cannot quit. In the first week of October, a single developer published free, open-source versions of all of them, plus four more, assembled over roughly two weeks of public work in which an AI model wrote most of the code. Whether or not the clones are any good, the speed is the point.
The project is called ArtCraft, from developer Brandon Thomas, and it ships seven desktop apps: PhotoCraft for Photoshop, FilmCraft for Premiere, LightCraft for Lightroom, EffectCraft for After Effects, and three more. Each copies the layout, menus and keyboard shortcuts of the Adobe program it mirrors, and all are written from scratch in Rust as native apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, with no browser wrapper hiding underneath. They spread fast: PhotoCraft alone had about 39,000 GitHub stars by October 10, and the seven repositories together neared 75,000.
The authorship is unusually well documented, because the project documents it. Generated contributor files credit Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 as co-author on 3,876 of 5,031 commits, about 77 percent, with smaller shares from other Claude models, OpenAI's Codex and GitHub Copilot. In PhotoCraft, those commits added more than 244,000 lines of code, and the public history of each project begins on September 30 or October 1. FilmCraft's developer guide describes an "autonomous work loop" in which an agent picks the next task, writes the tests first, builds the feature, checks it by driving the running app, and asks a human only about licences, spending money and publishing.
There is a second, subtler design choice worth noticing. Every button and menu item in these apps is also a command that can be called from a script, a JSON channel or an MCP server, the same plumbing that lets tools like Claude Code operate other software. The apps are not just written by agents; they are built to be driven by them. That is a glimpse of where creative software may be heading, toward interfaces that a human and a model can both reach.
None of this means Adobe should panic yet. ArtCraft is refreshingly blunt that PhotoCraft "is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work," and pegs FilmCraft at 50 to 60 percent readiness. Early testers report laggy controls, broken text editing and shortcuts that do nothing. But there is real substance underneath: PhotoCraft opens and saves layered PSD files and preserves the look of 307 of 309 files in a public test set, and FilmCraft decodes modern video formats with its own Rust code. Thomas reckons 99 percent parity with Adobe will be "measured in months and not years."
That last 20 percent is exactly where decades of accumulated craft live, and it is the part AI has always found hardest to copy. The honest reading is that generative coding can now reproduce the surface of a complex application astonishingly fast, and that surface is enough to draw tens of thousands of users overnight. Thomas, who says he is going after Office, AutoCAD and SolidWorks next, put the thesis more cheerfully: "Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now." The software moats built on sheer effort just got a lot shallower. Whether they have been crossed is another question.