In a Couple of Months: How AI Built an Open Source Competitor to Adobe and Microsoft

Developer Brandon Thomas has unveiled ArtCraft — a suite of 10 open source applications that replicate the look and functionality of Adobe and Microsoft Office products. The project was built with help from Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and quickly drew close attention from the developer community. But the success raises a number of serious questions — from the threat of lawsuits to code quality concerns in the age of vibe coding.

The full ArtCraft lineup

The package includes a complete toolset for working with graphics, video, and documents:

Graphics editors: PhotoCraft (~53,000 GitHub stars, ~45% complete) as a Photoshop analogue; VectorCraft (~7,900 stars, ~65% complete) in place of Illustrator; LightCraft (~11,000 stars, ~60%) for photo editing in place of Lightroom; EffectCraft (~5,800 stars, ~45%) in place of After Effects.

Video work: FilmCraft (~11,000 stars, ~55% complete) competes with Premiere Pro; DesignCraft (~3,400 stars, low completion) replaces InDesign.

Documents and office: PdfCraft (~11,000 stars, ~50%), WordCraft (~8,900 stars, ~60%), GridCraft (~3,800 stars, ~50%), DeckCraft (~2,600 stars, ~55%) — analogues of Acrobat, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively.

For comparison, established open source alternatives already exist — GIMP and Krita instead of Photoshop, Inkscape instead of Illustrator, Kdenlive and Shotcut for video, LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE for office work. But ArtCraft stands out for its fresh approach and heavy reliance on AI during development.

A legal minefield

ArtCraft copies not just the functionality but also the look and feel familiar to Adobe and Microsoft users. The developer claims the code was written independently, without borrowing from the original source. But that doesn't shield the project from copyright and patent claims. Patents can cover the design of a tool or the way it works, not just the source code itself.

As ArtCraft's popularity grows, tech giants may take notice and launch legal action. Part of the community backs the developer, arguing that Adobe and Microsoft — with their business model of expensive cloud software licenses — have earned this kind of competition. Adobe Creative Cloud Pro costs dozens of dollars a month, while all of ArtCraft is available for free.

AI sped things up, but quality still needs oversight

Brandon Thomas organized the work so that several AI agents handled independent subsystems (PSD parsing, GPU compositing, text layout, filters), while one human handled integration, testing, and releases.

This demonstrates a real possibility: AI tools are lowering the barrier to entry, letting small teams and individual developers take on projects that once required years and major investment.

However, the verification problem looms large. According to the Safeguard report (July 2026), 63% of the 1,412 professionals surveyed admitted to shipping AI-suggested code to production without full review. In open source, this is an especially acute problem: maintainers must sift through pull requests that look convincing but describe nonexistent bugs or propose useless fixes, eating up time that could go toward real improvements.

The developer's role isn't disappearing — it's transforming: now it's not just about writing code, but about being able to verify it. ArtCraft is still at an early stage (its apps are in alpha), but combined with the open source approach, the project shows that AI is capable of changing the rules of the game in software development.