ArtCraft: Adobe-style apps, rebuilt in Rust.

In the first week of October 2026 a set of repositories called the Crafting Apps went viral on GitHub: PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft and four siblings, each an open-source take on an Adobe product, written in Rust and dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0. They come from Brandon Thomas and the team behind ArtCraft, an open-source AI image and video tool, and he has said frustration with Adobe's cancellation fees is what started it.

This is a snapshot as of 2026.10. The project moves daily, so check the repos before you rely on any number below.

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Seven apps

All seven repositories were published between 2026.09.30 and 2026.10.01. Each one pairs with an Adobe product:

They are free with no subscription. PhotoCraft is the most developed and the one most coverage focuses on: on 2026.10.12 it had passed 50,000 GitHub stars, less than two weeks after it was published.

Clean room, not reverse engineering

Several headlines say Adobe was "reverse engineered". The project says something narrower. PhotoCraft describes itself as a clean-room reimplementation, "implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only", with no proprietary code, shaders or assets, and it states it is not affiliated with Adobe.

Clean-room is an old technique with a specific meaning. One side studies the existing product from the outside: what it does with a given input, what its published file formats look like. The other side writes new code from those notes and never sees the original source. What crosses the wall is a description of behaviour, never code. The best-known example is Phoenix Technologies' IBM PC BIOS in the 1980s.

Two caveats. The claim is self-declared: as of 2026.10 no independent party has audited it. And it was written largely by AI agents, which makes "who saw what" harder to reason about than in a room of people. I'd treat it as the project's stated method, not a settled legal fact.

Built by agents

Press coverage credits Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, and a planning document in the project describes one session that landed about 70 menu items "using 8 parallel agents". Anthropic hasn't commented on it, so take the model attribution as the developer's account.

What the agents produced is not a toy. PhotoCraft's README lists 24 crates that enforce a layered architecture, a GPU compositor on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DX12 and WebGPU), copy-on-write tiles, and more than 1,700 tests including PSD round trips. It opens, edits and saves layered PSD and PSB files, and the README reports matching Photoshop's rendering on 307 of 309 test files.

Every action is a command, reachable from the UI, a CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server with over 500 commands. So an AI agent can drive the editor directly:

photocraft-cli mcp   # expose the editor's commands to an MCP client

One codebase, desktop and browser

The part I find most interesting as a web developer is the build matrix. PhotoCraft runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and it also ships a static WebAssembly build that runs in a browser tab with nothing to install.

That works because Rust treats WebAssembly as just another compile target, and wgpu maps the same GPU code onto WebGPU in the browser. A layered image editor in a tab used to mean a separate web product. Here it is the same source, built twice.

How ready is it?

Not ready for daily professional work, and the project says so itself. It labels PhotoCraft early alpha, "not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work", and on 2026.10.05 estimated that it was roughly 25–35% of the way to a professional being able to switch. Known gaps include generative AI features, a number of missing tools (around 15 to 20, depending on the date you read it), advanced typography and plugin compatibility.

The numbers in circulation don't agree with each other, which is worth knowing before you quote any:

The first is a promise, the second counts features, the third counts what a working professional needs. The third is the honest one.

Why it matters

Even at 30%, this is a new data point. A small team with agents produced seven large, tested desktop codebases in a couple of weeks, with an architecture an experienced engineer would recognise. Whether it becomes a real Photoshop alternative depends on the slow work agents are worst at: the long tail of edge cases, plugins and the habits of people who have used one tool for 20 years.

I'd try PhotoCraft, but I edit in Affinity, which is already free, so it would have to do more than be free to replace it. Contributing is more tempting: I would like to help with what is still missing.

Sources: storytold/photocraft README · storytold/artcraft · PetaPixel, 2026.10.07 · HotHardware, 2026.10.08 · TechSpot · OrcaRouter, ArtCraft: Opus 5.5, seven Adobe clones in Rust · PhotoCraft clean-room write-up · Clean-room design