Seven open-source Artcraft apps launched over the weekend, recreating the interfaces and tools of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro.
Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the "clean-room replacements" in Rust, with WebAssembly versions available for browser use.
The software is still in a "super early alpha" state, and commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere flagged major shortcomings in the current releases.
Thomas first claimed 100% feature parity within a month, then softened that to 99% parity taking months rather than years as Artcraft pivots from controllable AI editing tools to a broader Adobe alternative.