--- title: "Rebuilding Photoshop in Rust With AI Agents Turns Out to Be the Easy Part" description: "ArtCraft’s free Crafting Apps launch fast, run on FreeBSD and edit real thumbnails. The hard part now is checking whether all that code works" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-12T22:00:00Z modified: 2026-10-13T17:02:54Z url: https://rews.cc/a/rebuilding-photoshop-in-rust-with-ai-agents-turns-out-to-be--884d99 language: en tags: ["rust", "ai", "open-source", "software", "productivity", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Rebuilding Photoshop in Rust With AI Agents Turns Out to Be the Easy Part *ArtCraft’s free Crafting Apps launch fast, run on FreeBSD and edit real thumbnails. The hard part now is checking whether all that code works* By Nate Ledger · October 12, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/rebuilding-photoshop-in-rust-with-ai-agents-turns-out-to-be--884d99 ## In brief - ArtCraft is rebuilding Adobe and Microsoft Office workflows as free, open-source Rust apps written largely by AI coding agents - In one reviewer’s tests PhotoCraft handled filtered selections for video thumbnails, and the apps started in about one to two seconds - Native FreeBSD builds exist, and a FreeBSD port of PhotoCraft was added on 9 October and had reached version 0.8.2 by 13 October - The GUI, the command line and AI agents all drive the same engine, so agents can perform any action a user can click - New versions ship within days, and the project’s own assessments list significant gaps in reliability and compatibility There is a recognised genre of software announcement now. Somebody says they have rebuilt a big, mature application with AI. The screenshots look right, and the replies announce that an entire industry is finished. Then, further down, some user finds that Save does not save. Christian Hofstede-Kuhn, [writing on his blog](https://blog.hofstede.it/artcraft-rust-agent-desktop-apps/), admits he usually scrolls past these, and that ArtCraft’s Crafting Apps looked at first like one more entry in the genre. The ambition is large. The project is trying to rebuild the workflows of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat and After Effects, and then Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all in Rust and mostly written by AI coding agents. When he wrote, the official lineup had twelve applications, among them SoundCraft and CADCraft, which suggests the goal has grown from “Adobe alternative” to something closer to “every desktop program you have ever paid for.” The apps are free and open source. Hofstede-Kuhn calls it “an ambitious afternoon, if nothing else.” Then he actually tried them, which is the step the genre usually skips. They are unfinished, and they also worked a lot better than he expected. He used PhotoCraft, the Photoshop stand-in, to apply fairly complex filters to selected parts of an image, and found it perfectly usable for editing video thumbnails. The apps started in roughly one or two seconds on what he calls a fairly average machine, and they felt quick to use. That is a real result, but a narrow one, and he is careful to keep it narrow. For a selection-constrained filter to work, the selection has to limit the operation, the filter has to produce output and the editor has to show you something useful. That is more than a convincing menu bar sitting on top of a JPEG. It is also not a magazine’s print workflow, a photographer’s RAW archive or a studio swapping complicated PSDs with clients. In his words, his tests establish that a program “can be useful for a thumbnail.” Whether it gets anywhere near Photoshop across its full range is a question “they leave open.” ![A cream and navy Swiss Army knife with many unfolded tools uses a red paintbrush to paint a sunset on a small canvas against blue.](https://rews.cc/img/e91dd6cb67765c7ad466c8988618430ab079f1e3.webp) I like this framing because it fits how people really buy software. Nobody needs all of Photoshop. Each person needs a particular 4% of it, and it’s a different 4% for everyone. A missing feature can be irrelevant to one user and fatal to the next, so “finished replacement” and “useless toy” are both bad descriptions of the same program. ## Why it feels fast His explanation for the speed has little to do with Rust as a magic word. According to the project’s own architecture documents, PhotoCraft draws its interface with egui on wgpu. It has a GPU compositor plus a CPU compositor kept as a reference. Pixels are stored in shared tiles that are copied only when they are modified. The tiles are the clever bit. Saving an undo state normally means copying the entire image, but here you only copy the tiles you changed. As Hofstede-Kuhn puts it, an inefficient algorithm “remains inefficient after the borrow checker has approved it”. The language matters because of these design choices, not because the code is written in it. The packages are small too. The launcher Flatpak he came across was about 8 MB, and the WordCraft package about 64 MB, though those numbers apply to the builds he tried and not to every version. The project’s own generated scorecard shows substantial misses against its own performance targets. Its committed baseline dates from 5 October and was recorded on a heavily loaded test machine, so it isn’t a clean comparison either way. Both things can be true: it felt fast to him, and the project still has performance work to do. ![A tiled mountain landscape with an orange sun appears beside a hand truck carrying an orange box on a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/6bb0616ffa5faebfec5f989578690690caf5efc8.webp) ## Yes, FreeBSD Then there are the FreeBSD builds. “Cross-platform” usually stops one platform short of the one you use, so for a FreeBSD user these are a genuine surprise. PhotoCraft has published a FreeBSD x86-64 tarball, VectorCraft lists a FreeBSD 14 build, WordCraft has its own tarball, and the launcher documents a native FreeBSD install. There is a port as well. [FreshPorts lists graphics/photocraft](https://www.freshports.org/graphics/photocraft/), added on 9 October and maintained by Piotr Kubaj. It installs both the graphical app and photocraft-cli. When Hofstede-Kuhn took his snapshot, the port had just moved to 0.7.0 on 11 October. By 13 October FreshPorts showed 0.8.2. It has no package on the current quarterly branch yet, and FreshPorts says it will arrive in the next one. ## Agents as users The part he finds most interesting is not the Photoshop look-alike. It is the architecture. In these apps the GUI, a command line and AI agents all drive the same engine. Think about what that means in practice. If clicking a menu item and an agent’s API call run the same underlying command, the agent can do anything you can click, without squinting at screenshots of the interface. Automation is built in from the start, not bolted on afterwards. He separates three things that tend to get blurred together: an image editor built with AI tools, an image editor an AI agent can control, and an application that generates images with AI. ArtCraft’s desktop apps are the first two. You can still open an ordinary file and edit it by hand. ![A human hand and a yellow robotic gripper shape a cream-colored vase on a dark pottery wheel against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/0f30bcb042ac21b1abf4a0b0f9085a1efb6ef3f5.webp) The third one is where the money comes in. ArtCraft’s main site promotes an AI image and video studio, including commercial services. The Crafting Apps are a separate family of local desktop tools, and Brandon Thomas, who started the project, spelled out that distinction in a Hacker News reply about subscriptions. So the free product and the paid product share a brand, and the free one is the one getting the attention. That is a familiar way to run a business. We have looked at that arrangement before. The project also describes itself as a clean-room reimplementation, a phrase [Phoronix put in quotation marks in its headline](https://www.phoronix.com/news/Photocraft-Filmcraft-AI), which seems about right while everyone works out what clean-room means when the authors are agents. ## The bottleneck moves The release pace is the part that matters most. Hofstede-Kuhn’s hands-on impressions come from builds around version 0.5. While he was researching, GitHub already showed PhotoCraft 0.8.2 and WordCraft 0.6.1, both released on 12 October. Each app has its own version numbers, so the suite has no common maturity level. Any review describes software that has already been replaced by the time it is published, his included. Here is the economics. For decades the expensive part of software was writing it. If AI agents make writing cheap, the expensive part becomes checking it: does the filter behave like Photoshop’s, does the PSD survive a round trip, does Save save. The project’s own assessments describe significant gaps in reliability, compatibility and professional readiness. In effect, ArtCraft is a live experiment in what happens when you can produce code faster than anyone can verify it. So far the answer is that a FreeBSD user gets a usable thumbnail editor, and someone still has to check that the file actually saved.