"vibe-coded" the entire Adobe suite in a weekend

Okay, chit-chat. please be seated and I need to tell you about the weirdest tech drama of October 2026.

So there's this guy, Brandon Thomas. Fifteen years of dev experience. Former Square. Knows Rust. And he got tired. Tired of Adobe's subscription model. Tired of the cancellation fees. Tired of paying rent on software forever.



So he did what any reasonable person would do in 2026: he asked Claude Opus 5.5 to help him rebuild seven Adobe apps from scratch. Photoshop. Illustrator. Premiere. Lightroom. After Effects. InDesign. Acrobat. All of them. In Rust. Open source. Free.

He called it ArtCraft.

Wait. What actually happened?

Here's where it gets fun. The original viral post said he "decompiled the Adobe suite and rebuilt it in Rust." That's not quite true. According to the devs, it's a "clean-room reimplementation" — meaning they looked at how Adobe apps behave, then wrote entirely new code that does the same things.

Think of it like this: Adobe spent 30 years building a restaurant. The menu, the recipes, the decor. Brandon walked in, ate the food, went home, and rebuilt the entire restaurant from memory using a robot-chef. Same dishes. Different kitchen.

The Reddit post linking to getartcraft.com/apps hit 4,000+ likes in hours. The GitHub repo is sitting at around 14,400 stars at the time of writing. People are hyped.



But here's the reality check

The apps exist. They run. PhotoCraft opens PSD files. LightCraft can import Lightroom's xmp presets — something other apps couldn't do because of licensing.






But "runs" and "replaces Photoshop" are two very different things.
One user found that PSD files with smart objects broke on open. Another designer said a moderately complex file opened but ran painfully slow, with constant tiny errors. FilmCraft crashed when importing too many video clips. The original promise of "100% feature parity in one month" quietly became "months, not years."

Basically: it's a very impressive demo. It's not a production tool. Yet.

The semi-controversial take nobody wants to say out loud

Here's the thing. Adobe's lawyers are probably already drafting something. Clean-room or not, these apps are designed to look and feel exactly like Adobe products. The shortcuts, the layout, the panel structure. That's not accidental. That's the whole point.

And honestly? That might be the real story here. Not "AI built software." But: AI made imitation trivially easy, and the law hasn't caught up.

Adobe can't easily sue over "this app has layers and masks." But they can argue trade dress. UI copying. The vibe. And when a two-person team ships seven apps in a week, "we independently invented this exact panel layout" is a hard sell.

The open-source resistance angle (this is the good part)

For years, the creative software world has been a walled garden. You pay Adobe rent. You like it. You deal with it. Alternatives existed — GIMP, Krita, DaVinci Resolve — but they always felt like work to use. Different shortcuts. Different muscle memory. You had to relearn.

ArtCraft's pitch is different: we're free, and you already know how to use us. That's the rebellion. Not "use our thing instead." But "use our thing without noticing the difference."

And the timing is delicious. Now AI has come for Adobe's business model. The irony is so thick.

What-if scenario

1. What if this works? Not "replaces Adobe tomorrow." But "becomes a real alternative in two years." Adobe's stock doesn't collapse overnight. But their *pricing power* evaporates. Why pay $60/month when the free version is 85% as good and getting better every week?
2. What if it doesn't work? It becomes a cautionary tale. "Vibe coding" produces impressive demos and fragile software. The GitHub repo gathers dust. Adobe sleeps fine.
3. What if Adobe buys them? Honestly? Probably the smartest play. Acquihire the team, absorb the code, kill the open-source license, fold the good parts into Creative Cloud. Classic.

What's next — and what you can do

Here's my take: download PhotoCraft or LightCraft. Try it. Don't uninstall Adobe yet. But do file bugs. Do join the Discord. Do star the repo. The whole project is explicitly asking for community feedback. This isn't a finished product. It's an experiment. And experiments need test subjects.

If you're a dev? The code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0. Fork it. Break it. Fix it. This is how open-source actually wins — not by being perfect on day one.

The bigger AI question nobody's asking

If one guy with Claude can rebuild seven Adobe apps in a week... what happens to every software company whose product is "a UI and some features"?

The ArtCraft dev literally said it on Hacker News: "Software is over."

Think about it. The value of software was never the code. It was:

1. The polishes.
2. The trust.
3. The support.
4. The ecosystem.

AI can generate code. It cannot generate trust. It cannot generate a decade of muscle memory. It cannot generate a community that files bugs and writes plugins and makes tutorials.
ArtCraft proves that AI can make the bones of software. But the meat — the part users actually rely on — that's still human work.

Which is... honestly kind of comforting?

And maybe If AI can rebuild Photoshop in a week, what's your job worth?

Cheers

 

And now they already have the cloning MS Office with the help use of AI. Open Office and Libre Office now get more friends, literally

 

I played the Wordcraft and Deckcraft. just wow, it is good. never imagine the future of agentic AI. wonder if there will be a "vibe code" for free claude fable, free capcut and so on.