ArtCraft and its army of LLMs: seven Adobe alternatives built with vibe coding
Xataka tells a story that mixes programming, AI, and plenty of controversy. Until a few days ago, ArtCraft was a platform for generating images and video with AI. Brandon Thomas, a member of the team, announced that he had used vibe coding to create open-source replacements for seven Adobe applications, written in Rust: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), PdfCraft (Acrobat), EffectCraft (After Effects), and DesignCraft (InDesign).
They are distributed for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and can also be used from ArtCraft. The article points out that Adobe has never offered professional creative tools for Linux, so this gap is not a small one.
A colleague of the author tried PhotoCraft for a few days: the basic functions work, there is no trace of Photoshop's AI tools, and the application takes up very little space. Even so, it does not replace the original for now. The creators themselves acknowledge that it is in very early alpha: it lacks about twenty AI and generative tools, depth in typography and professional workflows, and plug-in compatibility.
According to the creators, the approach is clean-room: they rely on public specifications and the observable behavior of the programs, without any proprietary code or resources. PhotoCraft can open PSD files because Adobe published those specifications. Online there is an unproven suspicion that Adobe's programs were decompiled.
Xataka also recalls the problems of vibe coding: AI-generated code can be hard to debug and may contain things a human programmer would never write, which is less serious in personal apps than in large projects. I think that is a fair warning. The author mentions Affinity, GIMP, and DaVinci Resolve as free alternatives. Would you trust an app generated this way?
Source: Xataka
They are distributed for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and can also be used from ArtCraft. The article points out that Adobe has never offered professional creative tools for Linux, so this gap is not a small one.
A colleague of the author tried PhotoCraft for a few days: the basic functions work, there is no trace of Photoshop's AI tools, and the application takes up very little space. Even so, it does not replace the original for now. The creators themselves acknowledge that it is in very early alpha: it lacks about twenty AI and generative tools, depth in typography and professional workflows, and plug-in compatibility.
According to the creators, the approach is clean-room: they rely on public specifications and the observable behavior of the programs, without any proprietary code or resources. PhotoCraft can open PSD files because Adobe published those specifications. Online there is an unproven suspicion that Adobe's programs were decompiled.
Xataka also recalls the problems of vibe coding: AI-generated code can be hard to debug and may contain things a human programmer would never write, which is less serious in personal apps than in large projects. I think that is a fair warning. The author mentions Affinity, GIMP, and DaVinci Resolve as free alternatives. Would you trust an app generated this way?
Source: Xataka
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