We are witnessing the birth of what is going to be a historic event. ArtCraft just released functional (but still in development) replacements for seven of Adobe’s apps, including the big three: Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. For free.
The ArtCraft alternatives are completely clean, open-source software. In other words, they did not use any of Adobe’s code to build them, and they’ve made their code completely accessible and free to everyone in the world. They basically just linuxed Adobe. This is huge! Anyone can download the code and do what they want with it. Want to tweak the way it works? Want to program some tools of your own? Share them with the world so others can add to them! And what this ultimately means is that, in short order, we are going to see ArtCraft’s alternatives reach Adobe-level functionality, and then far exceed anything Adobe could possibly do. And this will become a problem.
There are three reasons why I can say this with certainty:
First, Adobe only has so many programmers. The open-source community is larger and is driven not by money, but by the desire to create (that is, after all, why we programmers became programmers). This is why there are so many variations of Linux, some of them not so good, but several top-tier offerings that have improved so much that they’ve become extremely viable candidates for the soon-to-come exodus of people finally fed up with Windows.
Second, ArtCraft released Linux versions. This was something that Adobe refused to do. ArtCraft just tapped into the third-largest operating system. This has profound implications because suddenly Windows is no longer a constraint. There’s nothing stopping people from ditching Windows and going completely FOSS (free and open-source software). There’s also nothing stopping people from tweaking their creative tools. We’re no longer beholden to features we don’t want being included and features we do want being ignored.
Finally, and more importantly, by democratizing access to much sought-after software, ArtCraft has created one hell of a dichotomy. And this is where the baby starts moving down the birth canal.
Breathe.
If one company, in a matter of weeks, can replicate even many of the advanced features of Adobe’s products we now have a problem.
But Kapi, you said it was clean code! How did they reverse-engineer Adobe’s stuff so quickly?
They didn’t. Claude AI did. Those motherf***ers literally used AI to rebuild some of the most complicated graphics software on the face of this planet. And the AI didn’t have access to Adobe’s code either. Then they took the AI-generated code, cleaned it up, and built it in this crazy-fast programming language called Rust. The entire Photoshop alternative, PhotoCraft, was about a 70 MB download, compared to Adobe’s gigabytes. It took one second to install on my Mac, and it took five seconds to open. It works, and it works well.
There is no way Adobe is going to allow this. I’m sure their legal team hasn’t had any sleep recently. But they can’t do anything about it, legally speaking, as of yet. Their software was reverse-engineered – no Adobe code was used. The software was written by AI with no access to Adobe’s code. Adobe can even look for themselves to see if any of their code is there.
But the damage has been done. The ArtCraft code is already out there, mimicking Adobe’s products. Eager developers are out there, ready to make it work. Adobe has lost these products forever.
So what happens next? Does Adobe have any legal standing? Can they buy out ArtCraft? Hostile takedown? We’ll have to watch the news to find out. But what happens next isn’t the big question.
So who’s next? This is the real problem. Microsoft Office would be a viable candidate. And even if ArtCraft is taken down, bought out, whatever… it doesn’t matter because others will take ArtCraft’s place.
The fact is, the problem isn’t that the code is now out there. It’s not that Microsoft may be next. The problem is, the method is out there: using AI to replicate existing software without ever having to touch its code. Anyone can learn to do this, and quickly, because ArtCraft has been transparent and detailed about how they did it. They’ve built a template.
Think about this: Adobe just got royally shafted sideways – well deserved, by the way, because they brought this on themselves. Microsoft can see the writing on the wall – their push for Copilot is causing mass dissatisfaction among Windows users. Two of the largest software corporations on the planet are about to have some massive issues.
And now the baby is crowning! Because we are about to witness the beginning of AI regulation on a massive scale. If companies are pushing AI on us, and even on their employees, and AI can suddenly develop free alternatives, there is a massive conflict of interest. We can’t stop AI from generating code because there are now so many jobs dependent on AI coding. Therefore, we can’t stop AI from generating free alternatives unless massive regulation is put into place, which will harm the AI industry.
I think we may be on the verge of death for either AI or massive software corporations. Or even the death of free software.