Developer Brandon Thomas claims to have used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build open-source Rust clones of Adobe's entire Creative Suite — Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro — under the Artcraft project. Currently in early alpha, Thomas promises 99% feature parity within months, though users have already noted significant shortcomings.
Background
Adobe's Creative Suite dominates professional creative workflows but requires expensive subscriptions, motivating alternatives. Clean-room reverse engineering — reimplementing functionality without copying source code — is a legally distinct approach from piracy.
- Source
- Ars Technica
- Published
- Oct 8, 2026 at 05:56 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10