ArtCraft is building open source versions of what looks like most of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. Oh, and a word processor and a spreadsheet app because why not?
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In case you wanted a mapping for what they're trying to clone:
PhotoCraft - Adobe Photoshop
VectorCraft - Adobe Illustrator
FilmCraft - Adobe Premiere Pro
LightCraft - Adobe Lightroom
PdfCraft - Adobe Acrobat
EffectCraft - Adobe After Effects
DesignCraft - Adobe InDesign
FigCraft - Figma
WordCraft - Microsoft Word
SoundCraft - Avid Pro Tools
DeckCraft - Microsoft PowerPoint
CADCraft - Autodesk AutoCAD
GridCraft - Microsoft Excel
And these are literal clones, rebuilt from the ground-up by letting LLM coding agents interact directly with the original applications, supplemented by screenshots, videos, user reports, reference files, and public specs/docs.
The cheapskate design newbie in me is so excited about this!
Eventually one of the agents involved is going to overreach and include some identifiable proprietary code/files/whatever, and when this happens the IP lawyers will come down on them with maximum force.
I think it's a near certainty that this project will disappear, and there's a good chance that the people responsible will go broke defending themselves against lawsuits. Maybe this project is a stalking horse for a well-funded organization that wants to establish a precedent about software IP in the age of AI, but I still think that deliberately pissing off Adobe and Microsoft is way beyond brave and well into suicidal.
They already had to go through and remove a bunch of Photoshop mentions in the codebase.
What this company proves, though, is that large companies can potentially stand up their own in-house clones of popular software, customized to their own needs.
Relevant Ars article from a few days ago: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/software-is-over-bold-ai-developer-takes-aim-at-adobe-with-open-source-clones/
I can tell you that big SW companies like Adobe/MS/Autodesk have been aware of this threat for a few years. I don't think litigation will really stop this though because it could just be hosted overseas in some piracy-friendly jurisdiction.
I still won't trust vibe coded slopware. More stable alternatives exist already. Theft is theft no matter how large the company.
The concept of slop-cloned Photoshop 2026 is a bit nauseating—but mostly because Photoshop 2026 is itself so sprawling and unwieldy that I already feel vertigo diving into the menus and speed-closing the pop-up tutorials. Start with a decade or two of scope creep, remove the QA department, add some new bugs, and slap a slop icon on it...
Voila!
But I do think there might be a kernel of possible good here. Just yesterday Marcin Wichary wrote about the recent “relaunches” of RuneScape and World of WarCraft—and how there's plenty of bloated software that could benefit from a relaunch back to a simplified, earlier era.
A much better path than slop-cloning the Adobe and Microsoft suites, plus Figma, might be for an ambitious developer to identify one piece of beloved software of the past, and restore/update/transform it for contemporary computers. (Which to be fair lots of hobbyists are already doing, see for instance Infinite Mac.)
(I swear I was reading this organically and not off an alert on my name. 🤣)
I think this is unfortunately the really hard part that LLMs cannot help much with. Recreating something verbatim is easy; “going back in time,” but still keeping the good parts of the present, is a lot of hard thinking and design work.
Speak of the Wichary and he appears!
I'm not going to try it, but word on the street is it's really pretty terrible, and in no way a one to one copy.
You can also check out REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) on GitHub. It's basically what it says it is.
I don't think I want to use a reverse engineered version of one of these industry standard legacy software suites but the other day I was stunned that tracing app on iPhone was going for a subscription of $10 per month. So I thought to myself, I bet I can get claude code to build me that. It worked, its fine. I have no intention of monetizing it. I used it for what I needed, might use it again when I do. Saved me yet another subscription...
Aurich, Ars Technica's creative director, hit the nail on the head: isn't the premise of this project that we can, and some will, just copy the work of other people? The other KDO post today about reverse-engineered video games...same deal. I grew up pirating all the things; I now support the projects, artists, and programmers I believe in. Paying for tokens from one of several large tech monopolies to have their LLM reverse-engineer and reconstruct a copy of a product maintained by someone, or by a team, or even by a company as litigious and greedy as Adobe, feels like a step a backwards.
Having Adobe and Autocad slowly claw back the perfectly functional CS6 and CAD Lt perpetual license (that were legit purchases) by means of Windows updates so they no longer ran or could not be reinstalled after computer upgrades has left no love for their corporate profit approach.
While they add some new bells and whistles now and then, 95% of the way I use them are for the basic services. At least Microsoft still allows you to buy perpetual licenses. I’m just done with subscriptions so happy to see some competition to the big softwares.
Andrei Herasimchuk, who was the lead designer on Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, back in the day, is posting a lot on LinkedIn about how disappointing he finds this project. He says the software they’re copying has so many flaws that date back even to his tenure, why would you copy it? He wishes people were making better alternatives, not just duplicating 36 years of mistakes.
I remember someone created a rival to Flickr back in the day and looking at their code and URLs we realised they’d blindly copied all our mistakes. From our point of view it felt so pointless, and a waste of their time and energy when there existed the chance to improve and build.
Funny that for 20 years I would have loved someone to create a free clone of Photoshop, but now they’ve done it I dislike the idea intensely. Like Andrei I’d much rather see better software be made.
Yeah, this is the thing about copying anything: if you copy the result, you’ll never understand how and why the original became the way it is. That sort of “slop” has existed forever, well before LLMs industrialised it – I have made the case many times over the past years even on the topic of type “revivals”, and the conclusion remains that not caring about the why will make for a shit thing.
It also raises the same question as gen AI elsewhere: once you copy it, no matter how well, what’s next? How are you going to evolve it if there is nothing more to copy, especially if you kill the original in the process?
I don’t understand all the hate for Adobe. We used to steal all of their software because every app was $600 in late 90s dollars. Now you get a full production studio for $50 a month. I also have subscription fatigue, but I find Adobe well worth it.
After the initial excitement of seeing free versions of these apps, I wondered, "Who made this?" and looked for some kind of "about us". Nothing. The FAQ? Nothing. The "press kit", more nothing. No indications on the website of who might be behind all this.
That's creepy as all get out. If you make something cool, you should want to take credit for it, right? If you don't want to take credit, then maybe you don't want me to know who you are.
And if you don't want me to know who you are...what are you planning to do to me?
Hard pass.
Per Github, the founder is Brandon Thomas.
At least he can be found by people who know how to look - and I am not one of them.
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