Developer Recreates All Seven of Adobe's Top Apps Using AI

How

Thomas Brandon built a free alternative to all of Creative Cloud

Over the course of a year, Thomas Brandon rolled out a whole rebellious piece of software — ArtCraft, a project in which he recreated seven of Adobe's top programs and released all of them completely free. These are Photoshop (called Photocraft in ArtCraft), Illustrator, Premiere (FilmCraft), Lightroom (without the Classic version), Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign. All seven run on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

The project is written in Rust with help from Claude Opus 5.5. Brandon shared the details in a Reddit post, revealing that this isn't simply copied code but a full reimplementation of the functionality from scratch. Behind this work isn't some enthusiastic fan, but a serious developer with 15 years in IT. Before ArtCraft, he was CEO of Storyteller and worked as a developer at Square, writing code for fintech applications that required "six nines" of reliability — a standard through which billions of dollars passed every day.

Revenge for payments you can't cancel

Brandon's motive is personal. He's repeatedly run into fees for canceling an Adobe subscription. This practice became his pet peeve. When a corporation manually blocks your attempt to cancel a payment and tests your resolve through multiple screens — it leaves a mark. Brandon decided: artists deserve better tools, completely free, open, and subscription-free.

The development process is a clean-room reimplementation — reverse engineering where functionality is recreated "blind," without access to the original source code. Brandon studied what each feature did in Photoshop, Illustrator, and the rest, then translated all of it into Rust, using Claude Opus 5.5 as a development assistant. According to comments on Reddit, the apps in ArtCraft run smoothly, with roughly the same functionality as Adobe's. The project is currently in alpha, and Brandon plans to bring it to full feature parity with the originals.

A war over patents and the future of subscriptions

The situation is shaping up dramatically. On one hand, other developers could start creating clones using the same playbook — finding popular software, studying its functionality, and rewriting it with AI help. ArtCraft has proven it's possible, and that it results in a working product.

On the other hand, Adobe holds hundreds, maybe thousands, of patents on everything: AI object-fill (inpainting) systems, methods for fixing distorted text, shadow-removal tools, you name it. The question arises: would reimplementing a feature that achieves the same result but through different methods and tools count as patent infringement?

History has seen attempts to establish such monopolies. In the early 20th century, the American ALAM — the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers — tried to seize control of the market through the Selden patent on gasoline-powered automobiles. Henry Ford found himself among the "undesirables." A 1911 court ruling effectively gutted the patent, recognizing that the technology had a right to independent development.

Another example is touchscreens. The first patents appeared in the 1960s–1970s, but the technology evolved so dramatically and absorbed so many new solutions that it now has almost nothing in common with those ancient patents.

It's very likely that a war is coming between corporations and developers armed with AI assistants. Independent programmers will become the digital age's literal Robin Hoods, while corporations wage a fight reminiscent of the one that started in the 2000s over torrents. The outcomes could go either way — even as far as lobbying for laws that restrict public access to powerful AI models.

But one thing is already clear: if large-scale crackdowns don't stop this process, and homemade clones prove their stability, it will mark the beginning of the end for the subscription era.