Big quote: Adobe, a company that was once sued by the US government over its early cancelation fees, has seen plenty of customers abandon its products in favor of free alternatives. One developer has even used AI-powered reverse engineering to create a suite of tools intended to replicate Adobe's apps, leading him to declare that "software is over."

As Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to video production, vector graphics, page layouts, and PDF tools.

In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.

The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.

"We're going to reach 100% parity within a month," he said, which is an ambitious claim.

Thomas did seem to curb his enthusiasm in comments on Hacker News, though he still said reaching 99% parity would take months rather than years.

For now, the software remains at an early stage, and commenters have reported problems with basic functionality.

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