Atlanta developer Brandon Thomas pointed Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 at Adobe's flagship product and rebuilt it. The result, PhotoCraft, is an open-source image editor modeled on Photoshop — and it set GitHub on fire this week, prompting open-source veteran Eric S. Raymond to declare: "Adobe just got nuked."
PhotoCraft is the flagship of the ArtCraft project, billed as "an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust." Thomas didn't stop at one app: the project ships seven free tools in total — VectorCraft for Illustrator, FilmCraft for Premiere, LightCraft for Lightroom, PrintCraft for Acrobat Pro, EffectCraft for After Effects, and DesignCraft for InDesign.
Under the hood it's a serious piece of engineering. PhotoCraft already offers 34 tools, 16 non-destructive adjustment layers, 27 blend modes, layers, masks, smart objects and a brush engine, and it opens and saves Adobe's native `.psd` format. There's no Electron shell: the desktop app runs natively on egui with wgpu GPU acceleration across Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12 and WebGPU, with builds for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the browser via WebAssembly.
For all the hype, the project's own README is blunt: PhotoCraft is in early alpha and "not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work." Thomas himself puts pixel-matching accuracy at roughly 65 percent despite claiming full menu coverage.
The gaps are on the table too: no AI or generative features yet, about 20 tools still missing, advanced typography incomplete, and zero plug-in compatibility. A Gizmodo editor who tried it summed up the experience well: it feels like using "glitchy, but real, Photoshop."
On Reddit, Thomas said part of his motivation was sheer frustration with Adobe's subscription and cancellation fees. He describes himself as a 15-year software veteran with about a decade of Rust experience, and credits Claude Opus 5.5 with doing most of the coding.
The grievance has a paper trail. In June 2024 the US government sued Adobe, alleging it hid early-termination fees — on some annual plans worth half the remaining payments — and made subscriptions hard to cancel. In March 2026 Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement, split between civil penalties and free services for customers, with clearer disclosure and easier cancellation, while denying wrongdoing.
What makes PhotoCraft more than a curiosity is its agent-ready architecture: more than 500 operations are exposed as commands through the UI, a CLI, a JSON control channel, and an MCP server, so an AI agent can drive the raster editor directly instead of screen-scraping. PhotoCraft may first become a component in AI workflows rather than a replacement in designers' hands.
The community response shows the heat: thousands of stars and over a thousand forks within days of release, backed by more than 1,700 tests — including a composite oracle that diffs renders against Photoshop's merged images, matching on 307 of 309 files in one PSD test corpus. Raymond's "closed source is dead, dead, dead" post passed 1.8 million views. The rhetoric is overblown; the signal is real.
Thomas originally claimed the apps would reach full feature parity "within a month," then walked it back on Hacker News: 99 percent parity would take "months, not years." The business model keeps basic functions free forever; ArtCraft plans to sell tokens for its own AI image and video models instead.
For most users, PhotoCraft is best seen as a milestone to watch rather than a tool to switch to: proof that AI-assisted coding can now take on desktop software at Photoshop's scale. Whether it grows from "looks like Photoshop" to "works like Photoshop" will be decided by the pace of commits over the next few months.