Photoshop, Premiere & more: Experienced Rust developer recreates Adobe suite with AI assistance as open source

In 2025, Thomas founded ArtCraft, an open-source software platform for image and video production. He writes that he originally built ArtCraft for himself, friends, and colleagues. His broader goal, he says, is to give artists more autonomy. Before that, he spent three years as CEO of Storyteller.ai and says he has a total of 15 years of programming experience.

And what motivated the project? On Reddit, Thomas writes that he has a very strained relationship with Adobe after the company charged him a “cancellation fee” multiple times. His motivation therefore stems, on the one hand, from personal frustration with Adobe’s subscription model and the belief that professional creative software has become too expensive or unnecessarily proprietary, and on the other hand from the realization that modern AI coding tools have suddenly made recreating or reimplementing such software realistic even for individual developers and small teams.

On Hacker News, he also wrote that he believes AI could eventually enable developers to build fully functional, 1:1 open-source alternatives to proprietary software. This would, of course, directly challenge the business models of established software giants. His vision goes even further: Search engines, smartphones, and infrastructure could also be replaced by open alternatives, essentially “taking back” the internet from large corporations. He envisions a kind of open-source counter-movement to SaaS (software as a service).

At the moment, there are GitHub repositories for the seven apps: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere), LightCraft (Lightroom), PrintCraft (Acrobat), EffectCraft (After Effects), and DesignCraft (InDesign). All of the applications were developed from scratch in Rust. The project’s official website also contains links to the respective GitHub repositories.