TL;DR — Key Takeaways
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Developer Brandon Thomas used AI and Rust to create open-source alternatives to seven Adobe Creative Cloud applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere.
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ArtCraft has expanded its efforts to include alternatives to Microsoft Office applications and Autodesk software.
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Although the applications remain in pre-alpha and lack full feature parity, their rapid development highlights AI’s growing ability to accelerate software creation.
On Sunday, noted AI researcher Andrej Karpathy reiterated a point he has been making for several months: that there is a growing disparity between what most people think AI can do and the gigantic leaps in capability the latest models have made. Most people have, by now, tried the frontier models’ “derpy chatbots,” but few realize, Karpathy contends, how much progress the latest models have made in the sheer scale of what they can do, breaking new ground in mathematics, security research and other fields.
“Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind,” he wrote on X.
On October 3, a big reminder of that disparity came from developer Brandon Thomas, under the name of ArtCraft, who released clones of seven of the apps in Adobe Creative Cloud. Each software package was open source, written in Rust, and available on GitHub.
Instead of purchasing a subscription to the immensely popular Photoshop, interested parties can download Thomas’ PhotoCraft gratis. To say this work could be a major threat to Adobe’s business would be an understatement.
Thomas called his work a “clean-room reimplementation” of Photoshop, with all of that software’s features including layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, type, vectors, brushes and support for PSD files. The apps were available as web services as well.
A huge project, to be sure, but Thomas used Claude to spin up the replicas. The work was quickly derided as “AI slop,” but Thomas was quick to point out that he, in fact, knew how to program.
ArtCraft followed this work with an even more ambitious project, cloning the entire Microsoft Office suite, including replacements for Microsoft Word (WordCraft), PowerPoint (DeckCraft) and Excel (GridCraft). And for good measure, ArtCraft also has a 3D design tool, CADCraft, that replicates Autodesk’s AutoCAD.
All of ArtCraft’s applications can be downloaded from a single launcher.
Thomas has admitted that these applications are all in pre-alpha. While reports show they all work to varying degrees, they are still far from feature parity with the commercial applications they replicate. Here is where he hopes the open source community pitches in to do that last bit of work.
The Bigger Picture
But as surprising as these releases are, the bigger news is the pace at which they are being churned out.
For Thomas, the project was not just about saving Adobe’s annual subscription costs, though corporate greed is definitely a factor in choosing his targets. Rather it is a change in how we should think about what software does.
“Every closed workflow will fold,” he wrote on X. “No more walled gardens, only community.”
Neither Adobe nor Microsoft has publicly commented on these releases, and their initial response may very well come from their lawyers.
It’ll be interesting to watch how the battle plays out. Marketing engineer Joe Karlsson noted on X that U.S. copyright laws protect the source code, not the functions the code actually serves. On the other hand, Adobe or Microsoft probably put copying restrictions into their licensing terms, leaving Thomas very legally liable.
Others have seen ArtCraft as having a broader impact than just the specific software packages it targets. Open source pioneer Eric Raymond, for example, sees the work of ArtCraft as proof that “closed source is dead, dead, dead.”
What’s going to stop people from using AI-generated open source equivalents of proprietary products, especially as the open source models equal and even surpass the fidelity of what they mimic? Software is no longer a moat.
At least a few open source advocates have been well-aware of the challenge that future generations of AI poses. At this year’s FOSDEM conference, two security researchers described a process of how all open source programs could be reverse-engineered in a “clean-room-as-a-service” where the AI could recreate the code needed for all the functionality of a program, using README files, APIs, type definitions and other public documentation.
The resulting code could then be free of any licensing restrictions of the original code, such as the sometimes legally-thorny GPL.
This sort of task could always be done, of course, though only recently has the latest generation of AI models made it an almost trivial job. “AI enables people to do far more. To have bolder ambition, to accomplish incredible tasks without tiring,” Thomas wrote in one message.
