As AI improvement quickly expands, individuals are replicating paid-for desktop and cell apps with free apps, probably altering the way forward for legacy software program.
Final week, a Reddit person named Brandon Thomas shared a undertaking referred to as “ArtCraft” – primarily a free rebuild of the Adobe Inventive Suite, which incorporates programmes equivalent to Photoshop and Adobe PDF. The recreated companies have been named PhotoCraft and PdfCraft.
Advisable Tales
record of three gadgetsfinish of record
This software program package deal normally prices people $779.99 per yr if paid upfront or $69.99 per 30 days on an annual contract.
Earlier this week, ArtCraft additionally launched copies of the Microsoft Workplace suite.
As with the Adobe package deal, ArtCraft has introduced WordCraft, DeckCraft, and GridCraft, taking up Microsoft Phrase, PowerPoint, and Excel. Whereas the software program engineer behind the brand new packages is predicated in the USA, the programmes can be found worldwide.
Right here’s what we all know:
Who’s Brandon Thomas and what did he do?
Reddit person “u/ai_art_is_art”, the particular person behind ArtCraft, has been revealed as Atlanta, US-based software program engineer Brandon Thomas.
Utilizing AI platform Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust software program, Thomas mentioned he was in a position to reverse engineer Adobe’s inventive suite.
Saying his undertaking on Reddit, Thomas mentioned that this isn’t a “one-off flash within the pan that can die”.
“I’m not just a few informal vibe coder. I’m a 15-year trade veteran who has written the whole lot from six-nines fee rails that transfer billions of {dollars} of transaction quantity a day to superior robotics and optics automation. I’ve used Rust extensively for a few decade, and I understand how to construct and keep large-scale Rust initiatives,” he mentioned.
“Six-nines fee rails” refers to on-line fee infrastructure which gives 99.9999 % operational availability, whereas Rust is a programming language.
Thomas mentioned he had grow to be fed up with being hit with cancellation charges on software program merchandise and wished others to have the ability to entry them free of charge.
He wrote on the social media and information web site, Hacker Information: “We’ll substitute Google Search, we’ll construct our personal smartphones, we’ll construct higher infra. We’ll take away all of the advertisements and de-enshi**ify the complete tech world.”
What’s ‘vibe coding’ and the way frequent is it for app improvement?
Whereas Thomas denies he’s “just a few vibe coder”, vibe coding is no less than partly what he has accomplished.
Vibe coding is a brand new time period in software program improvement which refers to prompting AI instruments to generate code relatively than writing it manually. Because of this individuals who do not need technical data of programming can describe an concept to an AI software and have it create it for them.
In keeping with the IBM know-how firm, vibe coding is a “shift towards intent-driven software program improvement, the place AI methods help builders by producing code from pure language directions”.
The phrase was launched by laptop scientist and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, who wrote on X that AI customers might “totally give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and neglect that the code even exists”.
Vibe coding has grow to be extra frequent as AI has taken off and new apps have flooded Apple’s App Retailer.
The New York Instances reported that Sensor Tower, a worldwide market intelligence and digital analytics platform, estimates that new apps doubled within the first half of this yr to about 560,000.
Are there copyright issues?
There’s a authorized gray space round replicating software program which has already been established with out infringing on mental property.
On Reddit, Thomas described his Adobe-similar apps as “clean-room” replacements, which means that they have been constructed from scratch from publicly out there file-format specs, relatively than from Adobe’s proprietary supply code.
Nonetheless, there’s nonetheless little details about how a lot of the code Claude wrote and the way a lot Thomas wrote, in line with Technollama, a weblog written by Professor Andres Guadamuz, a reader in mental property regulation on the College of Sussex.
“We additionally have no idea whether or not the claimed ‘clean-room course of’ stands as much as scrutiny,” he mentioned.
Might AI coding kill legacy software program?
Probably.
The downfall of legacy software program is unlikely to make apps like Adobe Inventive Cloud or Microsoft fully out of date, however it might make them far much less worthwhile if there are free-to-use substitutes out there.
