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PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft: Adobe’s Suite Rebuilt in Rust by Claude Opus 5.5 Agents
Eight Claude Opus 5.5 agents launched in parallel and, as a result: seven open source applications that mimic Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, and even Acrobat, all written in Rust. This project is called Crafting Apps. Here’s what we know.
Behind this project is ArtCraft, an AI-assisted image and video creation tool whose code is published on GitHub under the storytold organization. Over the past few days, seven new repositories have appeared there. And they are not just any repositories.
Each application developed with Claude corresponds to a reimplementation of an Adobe application, meaning it was written from public specifications and observed behavior, without reusing any proprietary code.
- PhotoCraft : Photoshop, with layers, masks, and real PSD files
- VectorCraft : Illustrator
- FilmCraft : Premiere Pro
- LightCraft : Lightroom, photo catalog and RAW development
- PdfCraft : Acrobat
- EffectCraft : After Effects
- DesignCraft : InDesign
All of them are released under the MIT or Apache 2.0 license, free of charge and available with installers for macOS, Windows, and Linux, according to the official Crafting Apps page. Six of them also run in a browser thanks to WebAssembly, with FilmCraft being the exception. No Electron, no account, no telemetry. The interface intentionally reuses Adobe’s menus, panels, and shortcuts: if you know Photoshop, you’re on familiar ground.
Claude Opus 5.5 in charge
The role of AI is spelled out clearly in these application repositories, and these tools are in fact designed to be driven by AI agents. AI is also behind these vibe-coded tools: several repositories include a CLAUDE.md file, the one Claude Code reads to understand the project rules (tutorial on installing and using Claude Code).
These versions are not fully finished, and what is interesting is that the remaining work is measured in agent-hours via Claude Opus 5.5, the model released by Anthropic on September 22, 2026. By using 8 agents in parallel, the AI managed to create and implement 70 menu items in just a few hours. To reach 95% functional parity with Adobe tools, another 140 to 220 agent-hours would still be needed, or 25 to 40 real hours. So things can move very quickly...
Tests were performed with these tools, notably by the AI itself to validate its work. For example, PhotoCraft byte-for-byte saves 134 of the 135 PSD files in an initial test corpus (displaying these files, measured another way, is less flattering; we’ll come back to that later), includes more than 1,700 tests, and features a GPU rendering engine based on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DirectX 12, WebGPU). FilmCraft does without FFmpeg and includes its own H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and AAC codecs. Most importantly, every action is a command available in CLI and through an MCP server: an agent can drive the application exactly like a human.
An alpha version
Reading this article should lead you to believe that these tools are not yet stable versions. And that is clearly stated on the official site, where some tools such as PhotoCraft and PdfCraft are labeled Early alpha. The current versions are also still far from complete in terms of features, even though visually the tools already look very much like Adobe’s.
The roadmap, updated on October 7, states: "true parity with Photoshop is still well below 50%". PSD rendering matches pixel for pixel on only 115 out of 170 files (68%), and a professional’s ability to switch over for daily use is estimated at between 25% and 35%. We are still far from the finish line, but that could change quickly... FilmCraft, for its part, is estimated to be about 45% of the way to Premiere Pro level.
This project shows how quickly agents can produce functional surface area, but it can only work with human supervision. And as often happens, this kind of project gets a mixed reception: some will be happy to cancel a subscription, others will criticize these AI-generated clones, not to mention the potential legal risk against Adobe.
The developer, for his part, does not plan to stop there. He says he wants to tackle Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks, and is offering to pay contributors. "Everything can now be open source, cross-platform, and in Rust", he says. The repositories are already ready...
