One dev rebuilt Adobe’s full suite in a weekend using AI agents
One developer. One weekend. Seven applications that mimic the look, menus, and core functions of Adobe’s entire Creative Cloud suite. That sentence either sounds like a product pitch or a warning shot, depending on where you sit.
Brandon Thomas, a 15-year industry veteran who also runs an AI image and video generation service, shipped the project in early October. He calls it ArtCraft. The seven apps are written in Rust, run on Linux, Windows, macOS, and in browsers via WebAssembly, and are released under MIT or Apache 2.0 open source licenses. No subscription required.
️ The Seven Apps
Each application targets a specific Adobe product:
- PhotoCraft stands in for Photoshop
- VectorCraft mimics Illustrator
- FilmCraft targets Premiere Pro
- LightCraft echoes Lightroom
- EffectCraft recreates After Effects
- DesignCraft handles InDesign duties
- PrintCraft attempts Acrobat Pro
The repositories picked up thousands of GitHub stars almost overnight and hit the front page of Hacker News. Initial Discord and Reddit discussions promised 100 percent feature parity within a month. Thomas later walked that back on Hacker News, now saying 99 percent parity will take months, not years, and will depend on community contributions and bug reports.
How He Built It: Vibe Coding with Claude Opus 5.5
Thomas credits a fleet of AI agents powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5. His method is what he calls vibe coding: describe the desired outcome, let the model generate the code, accept most of it with limited manual review.
He measured completion in Claude Opus 5.5 agent-hours rather than calendar time or lines of code. That framing alone tells you something about how the economics of software development are shifting.
The code came from public documentation and observed behavior. Thomas states it is clean-room reimplementation with no decompilation or direct copying of Adobe binaries. Legal experts remain split on whether that distinction protects the project from Adobe’s terms of service.
Where Each App Actually Stands
Completion varies significantly across the suite:
- EffectCraft: roughly 94 percent complete
- FilmCraft: near 85 percent complete
- PhotoCraft: full menu coverage, but only 65 percent pixel-level accuracy versus original Adobe output
- PrintCraft: 35 percent complete, still missing a PDF renderer
Early tester James O’Malley described PhotoCraft as feeling “eerily familiar.” His exact words:
“I know it’s literally a recreation of Photoshop but it is.. just… Photoshop. My jaw is on the floor.”He also flagged a Gaussian blur bug when obscuring text, though he expected quick improvement given the software had existed for less than a day at that point.
Ernie Smith at Tedium tested the AppImage versions on Linux. He opened the programs and started editing an image within minutes. The binaries measured in tens of megabytes rather than hundreds. They detected discrete GPUs automatically. For Linux users who have felt abandoned by Adobe for years, that combination hits differently.
Why This Project Exists
The friction that created ArtCraft is not subtle. Adobe’s subscription prices kept climbing. AI features appeared in the product whether customers wanted them or not. Many creatives objected to their work being used to train Adobe’s models without clear consent or compensation. Linux support faded. The company answers to shareholders first.
Thomas funds the work through his own AI image and video generation token business. No donations required. The project carries what Tedium’s Smith described as a Robin Hood spirit, built specifically to address the economic and ethical frictions Adobe created.
⚠️ The Risks Worth Knowing
Two risks stand out for anyone considering building on or contributing to ArtCraft.
Security: A recent analysis found that 45 percent of code produced through similar AI-assisted methods introduced vulnerabilities from the OWASP Top 10. Rust’s memory safety properties help, but they don’t catch every logic flaw. Alpha-quality software that handles your creative files deserves careful sandboxing.
Legal: The clean-room argument has limits. Legal experts are drawing comparisons to Napster’s disruption of the music industry. Whether that framing helps or hurts Thomas’s case is still an open question. Adobe declined to comment for most early coverage.
The Verdict
ArtCraft is alpha software. Advanced filters, precise color management, and complex video timelines still need significant work. Traditional debugging still matters, and human oversight is still required to catch what the AI agents miss.
But the speed of the build is the real story. Traditional teams of dozens of engineers would need far longer to match interfaces this closely. One developer plus AI agents covered that ground in days. If you’re a solo operator or indie dev watching this space, the question is no longer whether vibe coding can ship real software. The question is what happens to every entrenched vendor whose products have grown too expensive or too bloated to defend.
Watch the repositories. The next few updates will show whether ArtCraft becomes a genuine workflow alternative or stays a proof of concept that made everyone uncomfortable for a few weeks.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
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