Love it or hate it, AI is changing tech at a rapid pace. Case in point: AI is now being used to reverse-engineer big-name software packages. Once complete, developers upload the cloned versions online as open-source tools that anyone can use for free. It seems no company is immune from these dupes, no matter how big it happens to be. That includes Adobe, and its legacy software like Photoshop, which now has a free-to-download AI clone called "PhotoCraft." I gave this clone a shot, and while it isn't perfect, it's remarkable how similar it is to the real deal.
What's the story behind apps like PhotoCraft?
One of the developers leading this particular charge is Brandon Thomas, a seasoned software engineer who has used Claude Opus 5.5 to build copies of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat Pro, After Effects, and InDesign in the Rust coding language. They all get new names—Photoshop is PhotoCraft, Premiere is FilmCraft—but they're very similar in terms of features and layout to what Adobe puts out and charges a monthly fee for. It's another seismic industry shift driven by AI, and Thomas is apparently building clones of Microsoft Office apps next.
According to the developer, Thomas "got bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times," which prompted the start of the project. "AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-shitty era," says Thomas. "But now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you." In another comment, he declares, "Software is over."
It's not clear exactly how Thomas completed this project, but he has used the term "vibe coding," so it sounds like some kind of AI-powered observe-and-copy is going on here, even with his programming experience. The developer has also suggested this is a more worthwhile endeavor than supporting open source apps such as LibreOffice and GIMP as, in his view, "There is no reason to save broken software."
Are apps like PhotoCraft legal?
As Ars Technica points out, reverse engineering is usually tolerated as long as no code is directly copied, but if the new suite of tools too closely matches the look and feel of the apps they're cloning, that could mean legal trouble. The truth is, no one's sure yet—and it brings up again the legality of the AI models themselves, which have been trained on vast amounts of human-made code to get to this level.
Adobe is no doubt taking a very close look at this, but while it's still available, I decided to give the software a try myself. You can download the apps from the ArtCraft website, though they're labeled as "early alpha" and "in development" for now. According to Thomas, 99% feature parity with the Adobe equivalents should be "measured in months and not years".
Getting started with PhotoCraft
The ArtCraft web portal offers a launcher app through which you can manage the entire 'Craft' selection of tools, but I focused on PhotoCraft as Photoshop is the only Adobe program I really make much use of. My first impressions: It definitely looks like a Photoshop rip-off.
PhotoCraft has the same color scheme, the same layout of panels, and the same menus in the same order—with the exception of Plugins, which I suppose will take a while. The keyboard shortcuts are the same, as far as I could tell, and the various preferences screens are very similar too—both in terms of the options you have and how they're laid out.
Most of the Photoshop work I do involves cropping and combining images, tweaking their colors and balance, and getting them in fixed formats for articles. I was able to transform my workflow from the Adobe app pretty much wholesale: The same panels, the same dialogs, and the same tools (from the clone stamp to the magic wand).
Plenty of image editors ape Photoshop, of course, because it's the industry leader—Pixlr, anyone?—but this seems on another level entirely. PhotoCraft is also fast and slick, and as far as I could tell, free from bugs. The only bumps I came across were some clunky snapping and selecting operations, which could definitely be improved upon but didn't actually break anything.
I'm by no means a power user of Photoshop, and people with more experience than me have found plenty of issues under the hood. I suspect that when it comes to playing around with more advanced tools and layer functions, cracks might start to show in the way you would expect from AI code trying to copy what another program does. I'm not sure "watch this program and make something that behaves the same" is the best way forward for software development.
That said, for me, PhotoCraft did everything I needed it to in terms of image manipulations, adjustments, and layer control, and did it well. How the app carries on long-term remains to be seen, as AI-written bug fixes and feature upgrades will presumably be piled on top of existing AI-written code—and that's assuming Adobe doesn't get involved.
Personally, I'm not going to cancel my Photoshop subscription: I can afford it, I use it, and I'm not yet ready to trust my projects to something that's been coded by AI. But this is the era we're in now, where AI can look at something—a painting, a website, a movie, a sprawling Adobe software application—and give you a very convincing imitation in not much time at all.