I’ve been using Adobe for more than ten years.
It started back when I was studying fashion design: Photoshop, Illustrator, then Premiere, and I’ve kept using them ever since. Along the way it went from a one-time purchase to a monthly subscription, and the price got higher every year. But you can’t really leave, because design files all over the world look the same way, and if you don’t use it, you can’t match up with everyone else. That’s what makes the giant so powerful. It’s not that it’s so great to use, it’s that you can’t get away from it.
Then a few days ago I saw some news and was stunned for a moment.
There’s an engineer named Brandon Thomas who, working alone, treated Claude Opus 5.5 as his coding partner and, in about two weeks, rewrote the whole Adobe suite from scratch in Rust: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, Acrobat. Then he put everything on GitHub under the MIT license. It’s free, it runs locally, there’s no account and no subscription, and it installs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
It’s called ArtCraft. On GitHub it has already collected over 20,000 stars.
My first reaction wasn’t “great, I can save money.” It was a chill down my spine.
I work every day with a team of AIs that do things on their own, so I know exactly what this means. Ten years ago, rewriting Photoshop would have taken a company, a whole team, and several years. Now one person with an idea and a strong enough AI partner pushed it to “it runs” in two weeks. This isn’t a toy demo. It’s something you can install, and it opens PSD files. Once this line has been crossed, you start recalculating a lot of things: how many things that are “expensive because they’re hard” are really just waiting for someone to show up with an AI and do it?
But I have to be honest and hit the brakes a little.
It’s only been out a few days. This is a brand-new v1 written by AI, and plenty of it is surely still rough and will break. Even media abroad put it bluntly: “still far from a real replacement.” So if you’re thinking of canceling Adobe right now and using this for client work, don’t. For now, it’s a stunning demonstration, not a mature tool. Keep those two things separate, or those 20,000 stars will easily go to your head.
What I keep staring at is something else.
Besides an interface for humans to click, PhotoCraft also has a command line and an MCP server, and VectorCraft can run purely on commands too. In plain words: it isn’t built only for people, it’s built for AI. That means I can have my own AI open it, edit images, and export them, without me clicking once.
That direction matters far more than “yet another free app.” Most creative tools today still run on the logic of a person sitting in front of the screen clicking. ArtCraft left a door open on day one so an agent can walk in and get to work. What I’m looking at isn’t whether it can replace Adobe. It’s what it demonstrates: the next generation of software will assume by default that the user might not be a human, but an AI.
And the author open-sourced the whole thing instead of hiding it to build a business. That hit home for me. Once AI pulls the barrier to “making things” this low, what’s scarce is no longer “knowing how to make it.” It’s whether you’re willing to share what you made so others can stand on your shoulders and go further.
I don’t know what ArtCraft will turn into. Maybe in half a year it’ll be mature enough to really use, or maybe it’ll stay a beautiful demo. But it has already put one question squarely in front of everyone:
What are you still paying for that’s “hard, expensive, and impossible to leave” only because nobody has shown up with an AI and rewritten it yet?