Photoshop in Rust in two weeks. ArtCraft has thirteen apps and rates itself at 45 %

“Software is over,” Brandon Thomas wrote on Hacker News in early October. “I just one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing.” Three weeks later, getartcraft.com/apps lists thirteen apps. They imitate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AutoCAD and Pro Tools have joined since. The most interesting thing about them is not how much they can do. It is how precisely they describe what they still can't.

One 42,000-line commit, then an agent factory

Thomas previously ran Storyteller.ai. The company develops ArtCraft, a studio for generating images and video. According to Déclic Media, on the morning of September 30 he pushed a commit called “one-shot” with 42,241 lines. That was less than three hours after the project's first commit. By October 13, InfoQ counted 2,152 commits in the PhotoCraft repository alone. Add 1,004 merged pull requests and 539,000 lines of Rust. Git records 317 distinct authors, and Claude appears as the author 277 times. The “solo developer” framing stopped being true almost immediately.

The apps are native for macOS, Windows and Linux, and most also run in the browser via WebAssembly. They are licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, work offline and need no account. According to Thomas, the money is meant to come from the main ArtCraft product, which sells credits for AI generation. He described his motivation simply: Adobe had bitten him with a “cancellation fee” one time too many. As of October 22, PhotoCraft has more than 71,000 stars on GitHub, PdfCraft 17,000 and FilmCraft just under 16,000.

The roadmap is more honest than the headlines

In Reddit posts, Thomas promised full parity with Adobe within a month. On Hacker News he soon softened that: 99 % would be a matter of months, not years. The ROADMAP.md file in the PhotoCraft repository is more sober than either version. It puts feature breadth at 76 %, because all 628 menus and 56 of 68 tools exist. Readiness for real work, however, is only about 45 %. The project meets three of its 25 speed targets. And according to the roadmap, Photoshop does not yet reliably open the PSD files PhotoCraft saves.

The project does not measure the remaining work in weeks but in agent-hours. Beta is 1,100 to 1,800 hours of a single Opus 5.5 agent away, full parity 2,300 to 4,100. The estimate is calibrated on a thousand already merged pull requests. The authors say about 80 % of the work can be split across several agents at once. It is probably the first large open-source project to write its plan in units of compute rather than people.

Independent tests back the roadmap up. XDA Developers tried PhotoCraft, LightCraft and FilmCraft on Windows. Brightness, curves and color adjustments worked. Automatic selection and retouching were imprecise, though, and HEIC photos from an iPhone would not open. FilmCraft could not play 10-bit 4K footage. In a separate test on a Mac, saving a layered PSD failed and FilmCraft's audio played only static. On Hacker News, one user reported PdfCraft working without bugs. The simplest app fared best.

A clean room with one person and a model inside

The project says it is a clean room. By its own rules, the team only observed how Photoshop behaves and looks. It did not take code, shaders or assets. It built from public specifications, such as the documented PSD format or the ICC standards. The tests include more than 250 PSD files generated by the real Photoshop. PhotoCraft has to render the same pixels.

A classic clean room, however, means two separate teams. One writes the specification, the other implements it and has never seen the original. That is how Phoenix Technologies wrote an IBM-compatible BIOS in 1984. No such separation is described at ArtCraft. The same person observes Adobe, writes the brief and prompts the model. And nobody outside can verify what the model saw during training. Legal scholar Andres Guadamuz therefore says, very cautiously, that the project “may be” on the right side of the law in the US. He sees the weak points outside copyright: in licence terms, patents and trademarks.

In Europe the ground is friendlier. In 2012 the EU Court of Justice ruled in SAS Institute v. World Programming. Under that ruling, copyright protects neither a program's functionality nor its data file format. Since October 2025, though, Adobe's terms explicitly forbid monitoring an application's inputs and outputs “in order to recreate” it. Ars Technica adds a risk over the look, since PhotoCraft markets itself with the promise that if you know Photoshop, you know PhotoCraft. As of mid-October, Déclic found no public step by Adobe and no takedown request on GitHub.

The real novelty is control by agents

The least covered feature may turn out to matter most. Every menu, tool and dialog in PhotoCraft runs a command from a single registry. The graphical interface, the command line, a JSON channel and the MCP server all call the same commands. On October 13, Jacar.es tried driving PhotoCraft and PdfCraft over MCP without a window. Image edits as well as merging and rotating PDF pages worked. PhotoCraft has 892 commands in its CLI, and PdfCraft offers an agent 161 tools.

For agents this is a different world from clicking through screenshots in Photoshop. The agent sends a command with parameters and gets a structured result back. If ArtCraft gets reliability right, it may not beat Adobe with designers. It could still win wherever graphics software is operated by a machine today.

Lilith's verdict

Two weeks produced an Adobe facade with half a building behind it, and the project honestly admits as much. The interesting part is not that Photoshop can be cloned, but that the remaining work can be counted in agent-hours and bought. Designers will stay with Adobe for now. Agents that need to edit a thousand PDFs without a window can switch today.