‘Software is over’
ArtCraft’s Brandon Thomas uses Claude Opus 5.5 to build open-source Rust clones of seven Adobe apps, then Office
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 9 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra160 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.599 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash190 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7129 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 99 days before it.
Key facts
- Repos under github.com/storytold, created Sept 30–Oct 1, 2026, licensed MIT or Apache-2.0, marked ‘early alpha’; native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD plus web (WebAssembly)
- GitHub stars on Oct 9, 2026 (GitHub API): PhotoCraft ~33.1k, LightCraft ~7.2k, FilmCraft ~6.6k, PdfCraft ~5.8k, VectorCraft ~4.8k, EffectCraft ~3.6k, DesignCraft ~2.0k. PhotoCraft had ~6.7k stars on Oct 7, a week after its first commit
- Built with Claude Opus 5.5; Thomas says he has used Rust for about a decade. Coverage: Ars Technica, TechSpot, PetaPixel, VideoCardz (Oct 7)
- Parity: Thomas acknowledges around 50% feature parity. He first promised 100% within a month, then said ‘99% parity will take a while… measured in months and not years’. He pays bug bounties
- Motivation: frustration with Adobe’s subscription cancellation fee
- Oct 7 expansion: WordCraft (Microsoft Word), GridCraft (Excel), DeckCraft (PowerPoint), CadCraft (AutoCAD) and SoundCraft (Avid Pro Tools), each ~0.8–1.4k stars by Oct 9
- No Adobe response reported; commentators flagged possible legal risk from close interface imitation
What happened
Brandon Thomas founded ArtCraft about a year ago. He previously ran Storyteller.ai and worked as an engineer at Square. Over two days he published seven Rust applications, each a “clean-room reimplementation” of a major Adobe Creative Cloud app, and said Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 wrote them. The projects spread on Reddit and Hacker News over the weekend and went viral on GitHub. A week later, on October 7, he added equivalents of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, AutoCAD and Pro Tools.
The apps are early alphas. Thomas puts feature parity at about 50%.
Why it matters
It is the most visible test so far of the claim that frontier coding agents make large, established desktop software cheap to copy. How much of it is truly usable, and whether it survives a legal challenge, remains to be seen.
Sources
5 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 2 primary, 3 press
Primary
- GitHub: storytold/photocraft (PhotoCraft, clean-room Photoshop in Rust)github.com, code
- ArtCraft: all Crafting Appsgetartcraft.com, official
Press
- Ars Technica: ‘Software is over’: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clonesarstechnica.com, press
- TechSpot: Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation feestechspot.com, press
- PetaPixel: Someone rebuilt free, open-source versions of Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom using AIpetapixel.com, press
Changes
- Filed