Crypto & Forex October 7, 2026 0 Comments

This Developer Just Upended the Creative Industry with Free Adobe Cloud Alternatives—And Nobody Saw It Coming

Ever wondered what it would be like if someone took on the titan Adobe — not with a fancy lawsuit, but with sheer grit, smart coding, and yes, a little AI magic? Well, Brandon Thomas just threw down that gauntlet, rolling out seven open source contenders to Adobe’s holy grail apps, all under his Artcraft banner. Picture this: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and the rest, reimagined in Rust, served up not in pricey subscriptions but for free, with browser-ready versions to boot. Now, I won’t sugarcoat it — these babies are fresh out the oven, still in the “super early alpha” phase, riddled with bugs and missing features. But here’s the kicker — Thomas, backed by a decade’s Rust experience and powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, claims AI accelerated this whole recreation faster than you can say “cancellation fees.” Is this the dawn of software’s endgame, or just a glorified glitch in the matrix? Either way, it’s a bold move shaking up the creative software landscape, challenging everything we thought was set in stone. Buckle up, because this isn’t just about apps — it’s about how AI might just rewrite the rules on how software gets made. LEARN MORE

Software developer Brandon Thomas has released seven free, open source alternatives to Adobe’s creative applications, saying he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to build them.

The apps, released under the Artcraft brand, recreate interfaces and tools found in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro.

Thomas described the projects as clean room replacements written in Rust, with WebAssembly versions available for browser use. The approach aims to reproduce software functionality without directly copying its source code.

The launch marks a shift for Artcraft, which began last year as a platform for editing AI generated images and videos. Its new suite targets users seeking alternatives to Adobe’s paid software.

The applications remain in what Thomas calls a super early alpha stage. Users on Hacker News and other platforms have highlighted missing functionality and bugs, leaving the projects short of the Adobe products they aim to replace.

Thomas initially promised complete feature parity within a month. He later moderated that forecast, saying reaching 99% parity would take longer but could be measured in months rather than years.

The apps are offered under MIT and Apache licenses. Thomas said development would be funded through paid access to Artcraft’s existing visual AI tools, which are available inside the applications alongside third party models.

He attributed the project partly to frustration with Adobe’s cancellation fees. Thomas, who says he has roughly a decade of experience working on large Rust projects, said he has coded exclusively with AI tools since February.

The release reflects his broader argument that AI can make recreating established software faster and more accessible. In an earlier Hacker News comment, he declared that “software is over” and claimed to have recreated Photoshop in a single attempt.

The current apps offer an early test of that claim. Their familiar interfaces demonstrate the speed of AI assisted development, while their unfinished functionality leaves Thomas’s promises of matching Adobe’s capabilities unproven.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.