Summarize with AI
ArtCraft has released free, open-source alternatives to seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps, from Photoshop to Acrobat. They are written in Rust, built with heavy use of AI, and designed so AI agents like Claude can drive them. All seven are in early alpha, so they are not ready for serious production work yet.
The apps come from the ArtCraft team, led by developer Brandon Thomas. Vice, citing Ars Technica, reports that he built them with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. The project calls each app a "clean-room reimplementation": rebuilt from scratch, without Adobe's source code. The apps are on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.
The seven apps
| ArtCraft app | Alternative to | Status |
|---|---|---|
| PhotoCraft | Adobe Photoshop | Early alpha |
| VectorCraft | Adobe Illustrator | In active development |
| FilmCraft | Adobe Premiere Pro | Alpha |
| LightCraft | Adobe Lightroom | Alpha |
| EffectCraft | Adobe After Effects | Alpha |
| DesignCraft | Adobe InDesign | Pre-alpha |
| PdfCraft | Adobe Acrobat | Alpha |
The team has since started more "Crafting Apps", including alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, AutoCAD, Pro Tools and Figma.
Built for AI agents
- Every menu item, tool and dialog in PhotoCraft runs a command from one registry of 500+ commands.
- The same commands work from the app, a command line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server.
- So anything you can click, a script or an AI agent can do too. The READMEs show how to add each app's MCP server to Claude Code with one
claude mcp addcommand. - The MCP server is opt-in: in PdfCraft, for example, it never starts on its own.
What works today
- PhotoCraft opens, edits and saves real layered PSD files. Re-saving keeps the render of 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set. It has 67 tools, layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles and type.
- Familiar by design: menus, shortcuts and panels sit where Adobe users expect them.
- Native apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus web versions. No account and no cloud needed.
- Honest status: each README lists what is missing. PhotoCraft says "much of Photoshop" is still to come.
Open questions
- Adobe has not commented.
- Press coverage questions whether apps that copy Adobe's interfaces this closely could still face trade-dress claims, even without Adobe code.
Sources
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