Is the software over?
Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote in Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being “bitten by the dark ‘cancellation fee’ pattern too many times.” Development of the completely free options offered here under MIT/Apache licenses will be funded, Thomas wrote, by selling token-based access to the pre-existing Artcraft IDE and visual AI model, which is offered as an in-app imaging option alongside third-party models. This revenue stream will help ensure that these apps don’t “become a small team orphan project,” Thomas wrote. “We have a team that creates popular software for filmmakers, so supporting that is fully funded.”
Filmcraft closely imitates the look and feel of Adobe Premiere.
Filmcraft closely imitates the look and feel of Adobe Premiere.
Credit: ArtCraft
Thomas is the latest in a long line of coders using AI tools to accelerate the long-standing but labor-intensive practice of reverse engineering (that is, replicating the functionality of a piece of software without directly copying the code itself). While that practice has generally been deemed legally acceptable, ArtCraft applications could still face legal problems if their “trade dress” too closely mimics Adobe’s familiar look and interface.
After coding exclusively with AI tools since February, Thomas said he envisions a near future in which everyday developers can recreate open source versions of popular paid software to “take back the Internet and own the technology forever.”
“Now you can create 1:1, clean-room, high-performance, cross-platform functional equivalents. Nothing stops you,” Thomas wrote. “We will replace Google Search, we will build our own smartphones, we will build better infrastructure. We will remove all ads and de-shitify the entire tech world.”
“The software is gone,” he gloated in a previous comment, claiming to have “Photoshop in one go. Everything.”
