Someone cloned the Adobe suite in Rust and open-sourced it
ArtCraft's PhotoCraft and VectorCraft rebuild Photoshop and Illustrator in pure Rust, MIT/Apache licensed and open to AI agents.
A viral post claims one developer rebuilt Adobe's apps with Opus 5.5, ported them to Rust, and open-sourced them. The repos behind it are real. They come from the ArtCraft Team, which calls them "clean-room reimplementations" of Adobe tools.
PhotoCraft (Photoshop) has about 4,800 stars and 554 forks. It ships 34 tools, 16 adjustment layers, layer styles, smart objects, ICC colour management and real PSD support. VectorCraft (Illustrator) has about 814 stars. It runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, and in the browser via WebAssembly. It adds exact curve booleans and SIMD rendering.
Both are dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0. Every menu item and tool is a command, exposed through a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so Claude or any other agent can draw, edit and export the way a person would. Roadmap siblings include FilmCraft (video), LightCraft (raw photos), EffectCraft (motion graphics) and DesignCraft (page layout).
One caveat: neither README confirms the Opus 5.5 claim, and the ArtCraft Team is a group, not one person. VectorCraft does include a CLAUDE.md, so AI-assisted development is plausible.
Why it matters: if AI coding lets a small team match a decades-old creative suite feature by feature, the moat around proprietary software gets thinner fast.
Sources
Primary: the company, paper or repository
- PhotoCraft: open-source Photoshop reimplementation in Rust github.com
- VectorCraft: open-source Illustrator reimplementation in Rust github.com
Written by an AI pipeline from the sources above. Methodology · Report an error
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