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Developer replicates seven major Adobe software with Claude, all open-sourced but still far from mature.

Oct 8, 12:01

Beating AI News Flash: ArtCraft founder Brandon Thomas, with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, has open-sourced 7 alternatives to Adobe creative software. All written from scratch in Rust, they are:

1. PhotoCraft: A Photoshop alternative for image editing

2. VectorCraft: An Illustrator alternative for vector design

3. FilmCraft: A Premiere Pro alternative for video editing

4. LightCraft: A Lightroom alternative for photo management and color grading

5. EffectCraft: An After Effects alternative for video effects and animation

6. DesignCraft: An InDesign alternative for publication layout

7. PdfCraft: An Acrobat Pro alternative for PDF editing and processing

This software suite is entirely free and open-source, developed for macOS, Windows, Linux, and browsers. They strive to replicate Adobe's interface, tools, and keyboard shortcuts as closely as possible, and can also connect to AI Agents via MCP, allowing tools like Claude to directly operate the software and modify files.

However, these applications are still in their early stages. Although PhotoCraft already covers all of Photoshop's menu commands, the developers admit that the actual functional parity with Photoshop is still far below 50%. Hands-on testing shows that basic cutouts and color grading are already usable, but operations like free transform remain unstable. Many users on Hacker News have also reported missing features and operational issues.

Thomas initially claimed he would achieve functional parity with Adobe within a month, but later walked that back, saying that near-complete functionality could take months. He acknowledges that these applications are still far from mature, hopes the community will participate in fixing them, and plans to offer bug bounties.

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