Free Photoshop and Excel: A.I.-Built Clones Take On Adobe and Microsoft
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
A developer used Claude to clone Adobe apps and is now going after Word and Excel. It’s free, open source, and still glitchy — but the pace is the real shock.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Brandon Thomas has turned one A.I. model and a lot of coding time into a very public challenge to Adobe and Microsoft. His project, ArtCraft, has already produced open-source replicas of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and several other creative tools, and he says the work was helped by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5.
The current lineup is broad. PhotoCraft aims at Photoshop with layers, masks, brushes and PSD support. VectorCraft copies Illustrator-style vector work. FilmCraft goes after Premiere, LightCraft takes on Lightroom, and there are also EffectCraft, DesignCraft and a PDF app meant to stand in for Acrobat. Thomas says all of them were written from scratch in Rust, and that no Adobe code was used.
The suite runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, while PhotoCraft can also run in the browser. The code is on GitHub under MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, and PhotoCraft has drawn almost 52,000 stars. Thomas also built in command-line control and an MCP server, which means A.I. agents can operate the apps directly. That last part says as much about where software is headed as any of the feature lists do.
Microsoft is next. ArtCraft is already working on WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, and according to figures reported by Thurrott.com, WordCraft can read and write DOCX files and covers about 62 percent of Word’s features. GridCraft is said to handle 93 percent of Excel’s formulas, while DeckCraft is still early. But the project has pulled its download links, so anyone wanting to try it now has to build from source.
This is still a long way from a serious replacement. ArtCraft itself says PhotoCraft is not ready for daily professional use, and outside reviewers have called it glitchy. There are also obvious hurdles around color management, stability and patents. Even so, the speed here is the story: one developer, one A.I. model, and suddenly the incumbents look a little less untouchable.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of open-source chaos the software giants have been begging for, only without the polite meeting notes. The real threat isn’t that ArtCraft is ready today; it’s that A.I. can make “good enough” clones arrive absurdly fast, which is exactly how complacent products get embarrassed. Closed models and closed apps can still win, but only if they stop acting like gravity will do the work for them.
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