Seven free, open-source clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps went from a GitHub push to roughly 19,200 stars and 2,500 forks in the day since Ars Technica first wrote about them, up from about 9,400 stars and 1,200 forks when the project went viral on October 7. The apps, grouped under the name Craft Apps and built by a one-person outfit called ArtCraft, cover Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. They’re written in pure Rust, run on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the browser via WebAssembly, and ship under the reader’s choice of MIT or Apache 2.0. According to the project’s own README, none of them carry telemetry, a paywall or a subscription.
The person who wrote them, Brandon Thomas, posts on Hacker News as “echelon” and describes his own background on GitHub as having built “high-SLA, five nines, active-active, 50kqps services” before founding two earlier AI startups, Storyteller.ai and FakeYou. He told Hacker News he has coded exclusively with AI tools, specifically Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, since February, and that the apps were made in roughly a week. His framing of the achievement escalated faster than the software did: “Software is over,” he wrote in one comment. “I just one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing.” Three days later, under pressure from testers, he walked the claim back: “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”
The method Thomas describes is what the industry calls clean-room reimplementation: building new code from a written description of what a program does, rather than from its source. The README states the apps are “implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only,” with “no proprietary code, shaders or assets.” That claim went viral in its own right after open-source veteran Eric S. Raymond posted on X that the team had instead “decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM,” concluding, in a post that passed 1.8 million views, that “Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead.” An independent technical review by explainx.ai called the decompilation story unproven speculation: the PSD file parser is written against Adobe’s published file-format specification and tested against real Photoshop files, not against Photoshop’s binary. Nobody outside Thomas’s team has shown a decompiled line of Adobe code, and nobody outside Thomas’s team has disproved one either.
The apps are free because something else isn’t. ArtCraft’s separate product, a token-metered AI image and video generation studio, sells subscriptions starting at a regular rate of $10 a month, rising to $35 and $60 on its pricing page, with custom enterprise terms above that. That revenue, Thomas says, is what keeps the Craft Apps from becoming “some orphaned small-team project.” On Hacker News he described the plan as giving “community token spend” time “to diffuse into the products,” and offered to pay contributors directly: “I’ll pay stipends and bug bounties.”
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| Paying subscribers ($10–$60/mo for image & video credits) | ArtCraft AI studio | buys tokens |
| ArtCraft AI studio | ArtCraft dev team (Brandon Thomas) | funds work |
| ArtCraft dev team (Brandon Thomas) | Claude Opus 5.5 (writes the Rust) | prompts & reviews |
| Claude Opus 5.5 (writes the Rust) | Seven Craft Apps (free, MIT/Apache-2.0) | generates code |
| Seven Craft Apps (free, MIT/Apache-2.0) | GitHub community | released free |
| GitHub community | ArtCraft dev team (Brandon Thomas) | bug reports, PRs |
| ArtCraft dev team (Brandon Thomas) | GitHub community | bounties, stipends |
Based on Hacker News (user echelon / Brandon Thomas). Mechanism as described by Thomas in his own HN comments; not independently audited
Measured against Adobe’s own published US pricing, the gap is stark. Creative Cloud Pro, Adobe’s full-suite plan, runs $69.99 a month; Photoshop alone is $22.99; the Photography plan bundling Photoshop and Lightroom is $19.99; Lightroom alone is $11.99, per PhotographyTalk’s review of Adobe’s listed rates. The Craft Apps are zero. ArtCraft’s optional AI add-on starts at $10.
What’s actually built
PhotoCraft’s own numbers are not nothing. The README claims more than 1,700 automated tests, 34 tools, 27 blend modes and 500-plus commands reachable from a single registry, exposed over a CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server. On PSD file fidelity it reports 307 of 309 files from the psd-tools test corpus rendering identically after a round-trip save, 169 of 170 in a second corpus, and 116 of 116 shape layers matching Photoshop’s own pixel output. The same document is explicit about what’s missing: AI and generative features, about 20 tools, “depth in typography and pro workflows,” and plug-in compatibility. It adds a caveat that matters more than the test counts: having every menu item wired to a command “measures wiring, not behaviour.”
Hacker News testers found the gap between wiring and behaviour quickly. One wrote that PhotoCraft has “a massive hole: RAW support,” which “doesn’t even offer RAW processing, it just dumps the raster straight in,” nothing close to Lightroom parity. Another couldn’t paste an image from the clipboard; another noted the clone stamp has no live preview. One commenter, checking a build claim against reality, called the FreeBSD support “hallucinating a non-existing” platform — “perfect slop.” The explainx.ai review put Photoshop feature parity below 50%, citing the absence of Select Subject, content-aware fill and healing, and no path for Adobe’s plug-in format to run at all; its conclusion was that no professional retoucher is switching this quarter. The repository’s own open issue and pull request counts back that up: 103 open issues and 53 open pull requests when explainx reviewed the project on October 7 had grown to roughly 203 open issues and 104 open pull requests a day later — exactly the “community token spend diffusing into the products” Thomas described, arriving faster than it’s being resolved.
A stock already pricing in disruption
ArtCraft’s launch landed on a company whose stock had already priced in a worse outcome than its financial statements show. Adobe shares were down 31.31% for 2026 as of October 2, trading around 34% below their 52-week high of $363.70, according to 24/7 Wall St’s reporting on the company’s fiscal third-quarter results. That came despite Adobe beating consensus for a fifth straight quarter — $6.76 billion in revenue against $6.70 billion expected, non-GAAP EPS of $6.13 — and raising full-year EPS guidance to $24.45-$24.50. AI-first annual recurring revenue topped $650 million, up more than 150% year over year; Firefly ARR grew 40% quarter over quarter. Adobe trades at roughly 9 times forward earnings, against 14 times for Salesforce and 18 times for Autodesk, with a new chief executive, Anil Chakravarthy, due to take over December 1. The market is betting the AI-replacement story outruns Adobe’s own AI revenue growth before that transition settles; PhotoCraft, built with the same model family that powers Adobe’s own Firefly rivals — Anthropic’s Opus line, most recently Opus 5.5 — is one data point in that bet, not proof of it.
Thomas isn’t stopping at Adobe. On Hacker News he said he intends to do the same to “Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too,” framing the method as general: “Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.” Reverse-engineering software by observed behaviour rather than copied code has generally held up in court; copying a program’s look and feel too closely, its “trade dress,” has not always fared as well, and nothing in Thomas’s repositories has been tested against that standard yet. The number worth watching isn’t the star count, which measures curiosity, or the test-suite count, which measures Thomas’s own definition of done. It’s whether the open-issue count ever stops outgrowing the closed one.