Haha, I wasn't ready to post this to HN. It's not anywhere close to ready. But thank you aghuang. (I want to post this again when we clear Beta phase.)

These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.

I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)

I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.

It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.

Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.

I like this mindset but damn that's a lot of tokens? At what cost? And then to continue to maintain and .. idk.. I suppose it'll work? If the motivation is strong enough and momentum is sustained?

Only have to pay the price once.

I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.

I m not really a fan of GIMP but Krita and Inkscape are both serious and competent apps with their own principles and features, made by people who care and who seriously understand their knowledge domains, and I would rather have either than AI-slop clones of Adobe apps that enshrine Adobe’s dated workflows in open source that no human wrote.

I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.

Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.

>I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.

Specially when the LLMs he is using to make this software were 100% trained and likely heavily influenced by the software he is shitting on.

In fact... this guy just made me coin a new term. Thanks.

"Shitting on the shoulder of giants"

that is a good one re llms

Those dated workflows are what people seem to want, they say any creative app that doesn't behave like adobe is not worth considering

Maybe.

Affinity works both similarly and differently and is now pretty popular.

It’s different but really not inferior to Photoshop, for example (better live filters, cross model curves, better layer blending), and it’s not inferior to InDesign or Illustrator, mostly. It does have a file format that allows all three to coexist (in fact it effectively always did).

They all have sufficient familiarity (the basics of the tools and layers are now pretty much a standard “medium” that most photo/painting apps implement, after all) but they have their own advantages. The integration between the three apps is way ahead.

I just don’t see why anyone would make open source apps that don’t move things forward (Krita and Inkscape do, in their own ways).

It’s also a pretty hollow demonstration of AI, ultimately, to use it to just clone ripoffs, but it does have a sort of fractal self-similarity I suppose.

Affinity is not open source so there's that. There should be an OSS Photoshop drop in alternative like affinity tries to be

Is there an open source “drop-in alternative” for really any desktop app of substance? Plenty of excellent alternatives, very few that drop in and don’t have some kind of conceptual differences (even LibreOffice, which after all started as a closed source app).

I don’t think anyone is served well by pursuing blatant cloning in open source. But if this is the shoddy destiny of AI coding then I am at peace with it. People can use lazy knockoffs if they want.

if it is a drop-in replacement, it is not an alternative but a copy.

an alternative is supposed to be somewhat different by definition.

I'd need to give at least some 10 years of your life to achieve this. GIMP, Krita and inkscape are amazing projects.

Yeah, fuck those dorks whose shoulders your LLM stands on. Pull the ladder up!

I will not stand for the Krita slander >:( ! Gimp and Inkscape I haven't used much, but they also had pretty neat updates lately.

Just because you like these apps doesn't mean I'm happy with them and have to settle. Nor does it imply everyone in the market is happy with these tools. I'm sure lots of people share my opinion.

I've used nearly every open source creative tool that open source has to offer, and I've been deeply unsatisfied by what's available.

I've repeatedly tried to get into Krita over the years and it's just not my cup of tea. It's fine if it works for you, but I'm not happy with it.

I don't like Kdenlive either. Or much of anything from or built with KDE or Gnome.

I don't buy it that you tried everything open source had to offer but I do agree that kdenlive is pretty... eh... never used it but the little I saw from it didn't make me feel they're about to change the world of editing.

Even though it's not Open Source, davinci resolve has been pretty good to me, even the free version, it's sick bro you should try it out! Even if you do feel like you'd rather make your own software suite, you should at the very try to take a few notes from davinci Fusion, your users will be thankful:

- having a node representation for compositions has some drawbacks but massive advantages when it comes to visualizing and organizing scenes - copying nodes/layers/effects and getting plaintext in your clipboard is EXTREMELY powerful and underused, it basically means that any text manipulation becomes potential automation. This is a super cool feature and even though I will not use your software, I think you should look into it!

Just wanted to say at least for the non-creative apps I am already doing that at https://azul.rs

But its a lot harder if you want to maintain at least some level of quality. For example, your PDF export exports texts as paths and correct PDF encoding and font subsetting took months of trial and error (I maintain the printpdf crate).

So you have to actually use your apps, test extensively, etc. - don‘t underestimate the effort required for QA and testing.

I'd love to see something like this for Solidworks, but think you're in for a boatload of trouble there. OpenCASCADE is less capable than Parasolid, and a true Rust-based parametric geometry kernel capable of boolean joins, fillets, etc. needed for anything resembling a modern feature set is wickedly difficult (that's one of the reasons why everyone licenses existing ones and don't try to roll their own).

Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!

Indeed. If you are going to burn tokens to clone something, then assembling a team of people who could help you burn those tokens in service of a bRep kernel (let alone a Parasolid kernel) would be an interesting undertaking.

With photoshop, illustrator, etc., there’s a fair amount of code out there. No LLM has however ever seen the source code —- or I suspect even much detailed discussion —- of a bRep kernel better than Opencascade, but with the right people to decide what maths to work on, maybe there is progress to be made. This knowledge is held by few people, many of whom will now have retired!

It’s not what you’re after but onshape is pretty respectable, and the free offering is decent.

I've played around with most of the solutions in this space (OnShape, Fusion360, FreeCAD, Solvespace), but honestly at this point would probably just end up paying for the Solidworks hobbyist license; it's like $4/month and I have a Windows desktop available. That said, there's been some consensus built over the past few years about what the next-gen CAD software should probably look like, ranging from modern scripting capabilities to version control and intermediate shape representations.

A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.

These days I just use rhino/grasshopper via Claude code and MCP, and half the time it just writes python scripts that run in the GH context.

There’s plenty of work that’s not appropriate for, but works for me.

There is Truck - "Rust CAD Kernel" (https://github.com/ricosjp/truck) being developed by a Japanese CAE company, but not sure how full featured it is currently.

I am building one, it is Oblikovati, https://github.com/Oblikovati/Oblikovati/tree/go-legacy

It started about 6 months back, kernel build from scratch in go. I changed directions now and decided to rewrite in rust, take the good parts of occt and the good parts of my own kernel and build a new one child of both.

So far it did not get traction, I guess I should had named it SolidCraft :D

I'm doing a run at rebuilding a few of Apple's bundled apps (iPhoto, iTunes, Mail) as they were back around 2015, the replacements are much worse in the ways I care about so at this point rebuilding as GTK + Rust seems like a worthwhile experiment. I only started last week though so I don't have a sense of how long it will take yet.

> AutoCAD, and Solidworks too

You may want those in new high-performance infinite precision: https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal

Exact curves: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve

Meshes: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh

and more in the ~22 crate stack.

This is fantastic! Thank you for building these and pointing me in this direction.

I'll be pinging you about this in the future

I've rolled the stack into a monorepo under https://github.com/timschmidt/csgrs which should make it much easier to work with.

omg an open-source solidworks that runs on Linux would be incredible. Freecad is just too hard to work with.

LibreOffice could see some UI and compatibility work, the compatibility work is mostly done

The videos of the features are very well done, and it looks like there is a unified vision, which is not what any of the other products have. Did Google copy some of the UI/UX? I was curious where their inspirations were, and I think this may have been it.

I look forward to the beta and beyond!

Despite whatever else happens with AI, I am excited about the near future where we have an open source version of basically every app. I hope this is the beginning of the end of the subscription model. Keep it up!

Do these expose a scripting API? ExtendScript is basically ecmascript3 used in Adobe apps, would be cool to have modern js available

This project looks extremely ambitious. Are these applications coded by AI by any chance? I can't find any easy documentation about the development process.

They are clearly all vibe-coded

are you kidding? its all vibe coding

> are you kidding? its all vibe coding

Disagree.

There's a difference between "vibe coding" and incorporating AI into a software development process. Hobbyists vibe code for shits and giggles on the weekends.

These guys incorporated dozens of pre-existing Rust packages into their codebases, made sure the apps ran on macOS, Windows and Linux and in modern web browsers. That’s not vibe coding.

Did they use coding agents to assist them? Of course! No different than teams at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, etc. Re-creating Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, etc. from scratch in Rust is a huge undertaking; one that would have been impossible just a couple of years ago.

no, they're vibcoding. they aren't looking at the code or even testing the output themselves.

Given the size of the undertaking the only pattern that would make any sense at all is a software factory.

So I really hope it's all vibe coded. Even if it fails the agents files and tickets will remain and perhaps succeed when the tech is ripe.

> No different than teams at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, etc.

Well, the originator is here on this site saying he's not written a line of code since February of this year.

It's all AI-generated.

Amazing work!

> Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again

we remember different 1999s. i remember everyone pirating software made by large companies at that moment in time

Isn't that exactly what this thread is about? Technically?

do you mean to equate stealing software crafted by people who made sure it worked by "cracking" it to "pirating" decades of human effort by paying anthropic thousands of dollars to generate broken versions of it?

i am not sure i follow. it certainly isn't technically the same.

The prospect does sound interesting, but if you truly push through with that, I hope that you have a capable legal team.

Someone will make up new laws just to get rid of that specifically and that will likely even work, if one guy is behind _all_ the recreations.

Maybe you could somehow distribute that, so that it's at least a game of whack-a-mole for the defender.

__

This btw is made orders of magnitude worse by the fact that you are trying to make money off those recreations, and you're doing so right now.

So the whole "I was just a foss & rust absolutist" defense doesn't count.

So.. eh. Idk man. Icarus with a claude jetpack I guess.

___

Also, keep in mind the sums of money that are involved in what you're attacking there.

Those are software companies with leverage of a small country. They can also simply just disappear you if you fuck with them too much. Which is not hyperbole.

That's so much money, it bends the rules of reality you think you have outsmarted.

If it's not "them" as an entity, it will be "that one manager that is scared of their personal bonus" that will personally go through any means necessary to make it stop.

Remember the ebay stalking scandal?

Remember the Boeing whistleblower?

> you are trying to make money off those recreations

These are not monetized in any way. They don't have telemetry, paywalls, or anything.

If you're looking at the other software we've built, that's a source available (soon to be open source) Higgsfield and OpenRouter/FAL.

https://getartcraft.com/pricing exists

Yes, I know what you're going to say that it's technically something different, but, really, man.

The people you're messing with cannot simply be outsmarted on technicalities in the way a "HN contrarian" (as per your bio) would win a debate on this platform.

Dont aim for solidworks, aim for AutoCad & Inventor - The AutoDesk Suite.

it's ready enough for reddit though? or is u/ai_art_is_art not you?

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1wwnhbt/ive_created_o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1wxmunv/ive_created...

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wwo52q/ive_creat...

https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1wvz0lj/100_open_so...

https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1wvz4ua/100_ope...

> We have estimates for feature parity checked into the roadmap files of each app. We should be in "Beta" stage / ~100% parity within a month.

> We're going to reach 100% parity within a month.

Can't wait to check back in a month!

I'd love to see a better Office software and AutoCad software! Especially ones that can be manipulated more programatically by agents or at the CLI, like your PrintCraft and similar projects. I think that would be awesome to interact with dwg and xlsx files using a CLI!

A bit late for the comments, but please try to assure the quality of the software before going for new projects. These looks very promising! But they are not usable if they don't really work. There should be very low tolerance for bugs.

re: ms office, you should take a look at visigrid for the excel bits.

It's also rust based and very polished with a cli tool for automation. Can't speak to feature parity as I'm not an accountant or someone who traffics in spreadsheets but it suits my needs to the point I don't reach for a company subscription.

That's the bar for an AI generated app that I'd like to see your Adobe CC/CS apps hit.

I'll keep an eye on your repos!

OMG, the page design is incredible

sarcasm?

Not sure, but at least it isn't beige.

i don't want to have to sign up / log in just to test drive the desktop app?

you don't have to?

https://github.com/storytold

> i don't want to have to sign up / log in just to test drive the desktop app?

Nope. I just downloaded and installed PhotoCraft [1] and launched it. No sign-up, dialog boxes, licensing agreement.

The installer for LightCraft [2] isn't ready yet; building it from source took about 5 minutes.

[1]: https://getartcraft.com/apps/photocraft

[2]: https://getartcraft.com/apps/lightcraft

Just curious, what is the subscription for? Purely for image generations? Are these built into the apps, or just a web feature?

That's a web feature / separate open source app. It's open source HiggsField (app, backend infra).

The Adobe apps are 100% open source, desktop, MIT, no telemetry.

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft etc.

I'll just keep using Affinity.

I am holding onto my copy of Affinity 2 and never letting go... mainly because Canva never bothered porting the third version to iPad and the whole point of me buying Affinity was that I could open the same project on iPad and Windows.

Affinity for iPad is still coming — apparently in November.

It’s not a simple port, is it? The iPad apps have significantly different UI and a more iPadOS-ish UX, and their release has always lagged (though, ironically, Affinity started out as an iPad project within Serif; the hardware wasn’t ready so they pivoted to the Mac, but things like canvas rotation were still tested first on the iPad for feasibility)

The iPad version of Affinity is being teased on their downloads page: https://www.affinity.studio/download

…which was bought by Canva and has already been enshittified.

It really hasn't been enshittified. They made everything that already existed in Affinity free without any catches. And then added some new AI powered editing tools which require a subscription. Tools which you don't need and can ignore easily.

It was enshittified the moment it became a single app.

Serious publishers don't want a photo editing program in their UI.

> Serious publishers don't want a photo editing program in their UI.

That's not how it works; when you're in the Layout Studio, that's your UI and nothing else.

I think the confusion is that some tools appear in the Layout Studio and the Pixel Studio because they make sense in those contexts.

Affinity lets you customize each Studio and the overall UI to your heart's content [1].

[1]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/workspace-about-studios/#cu...

I'll lend some support to the complaints - V3 is just so much slower than V2, nevermind V1, and it's using a lot more system resources now. It seems that lumping everything into one app has bloated it out in just the same way that Adobe's stuff got bloated, and it's sad to see Affinity drift in that direction as well.

I have all 3 versions installed, but most of the time I reach for Affinity Photo V1 just because it will launch faster. If I need Designer, I reach for Affinity Designer V2.

The way it works now is pretty much how studio link worked in v2 if you had all three apps (and indeed the file format was already shared by the three apps, under the hood).

Nothing has been enshittified, and indeed if you knew anything about Affinity, the fact that they chose that name, had a three pointed logo and a single shared file architecture, and the way they have talked about the integration in the suite, you would have predicted this for v3 whether or not Canva bought them. This integration was always going to happen.

> which was bought by Canva and has already been enshittified

Absolutely not.

Affinity just released an update [1] that delivered features like the Blend Tool that users have wanted for years. Cost: $0.

In addition to MCP support, users can now automate the Affinity suite using JavaScript [2].

[1]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/release-notes/

[2]: https://www.affinity.studio/help/scripting-in-affinity/

Still no linux support.

Affinity works fine on Linux using this: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer

Yes, even hardware acceleration works.

i like this project, the scope is enough to test most of the claims being made about vibe coding

I'm interested to keep an eye on this. Doesn't seem like it's in a usable state right now but if it ends up workable this will really shake up the entire software industry.

yep. people make all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about the capabilities of agentic coding, this is a great test of those claims.

Whether it gets finished or not will say more about the developer than AI.

As soon as I saw this software suite about 2 days ago, I shorted Adobe Inc immediately.

Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.

Same for Microsoft and others. There is still a business in selling and supporting software, but not in creating it, and barriers to entry are now purely about sales and service.

These companies are going to start tagging files not made by their software as not being "genuine" and freak out a bunch of IT people, who will then ban these apps.

I mean pdf is made by Adobe so they can change their standard. If I were distributing software I’d want guarantees it only ingests trusted data, not only for software but for non-tech peoples trusts. No need for poisoned data further diving into the software/llms.

PDF is an ISO standard. People are buying Acrobat to open, edit, and publish ISO-standard PDF files, NOT just "the shit Acrobat publishes".

Now that being said, Adobe has plenty of non-standardized file formats that they absolutely could do AutoCAD-style shenanigans with.

> These companies are going to start tagging files not made by their software as not being "genuine" and freak out a bunch of IT people, who will then ban these apps.

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

The backlash against Adobe would be intense from users and the industry for attempting to break JPEG's interoperability as an ISO standard.

Let’s not get carried away here; Adobe has competed against hundreds of image editors ever since Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 and haven’t messed with the interoperability of their file formats.

Just to be clear, nobody at Adobe is losing sleep over a suite of free apps that are knock-offs of Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, etc. for now.

Are we looking at the same stock? I am confused where this data is coming from. What I see is stock slightly higher than it was week ago, fell compared to day ago, and the change is 1-2%, way less than you 50% fall claim.

As I understood the message, the GP post stated their predicted price for Adobe, and the target price for the options they purchased, not any change in price that has already occurred.

"$120 price target" is a prediction about the price in some near-ish term time range.

Adobe's moat is so small, so it's a matter of time until someone frustrated with their pricing would rather just rebuild the entire Creative Suite. I have also rebuilt the features from Photoshop I want using Rust recently (primarily because the company I work for started blocking Photopea, but I digress...) and it's been a great to work with. I can imagine the same would hold true for Lightroom, Illustrator, and Indesign.

Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction

I am sure adobe has known about this, so they pivoted to web aka cloud Saas for businesses a few years ago

Adobe’s problem isn’t that we replace their tools with AI created tools. It’s that we replace the use of their tools with the use of AI.

Yep. You've jumped right to the end of this story.

I think the same thing about the endless proliferation of Web-dev frameworks. Why bother? Just have AI write it in native JS or WebAssembly and be done with it.

Both actually

> someone frustrated with their pricing

What about their service?

Yep. I was on a long plane trip and settled in to do a bunch of work in InDesign, only to have the POS try to re-validate my subscription at that moment, without even a one-day workaround to no Internet connection.

But then I remembered that the flight had free Internet. So I log in... only to have these morons try to TEXT my phone a 2FA code. On the plane.

After I got back I checked with our IT department and found that our Adobe licenses are paid up for TWO YEARS.

Despicable.

Same. I hate paying Creative Suite, so during few hours I vibecoded Photoshop clone for myself in rust, with only the features I am using. Have been using it for the last 9 months, no problem. Super fast start, full PSD support, layers, texts etc.

”Etc” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I’m sure it works great for you, but something simple as “layers” is for me smart objects with plugin support and Camera Raw integration.

Photoshop has a lot of bad things going for it, but it’s still the only software that does what it does, and I’ve tried all the competitors that have popped up over the years.

If you have the time those are just 1-5 hour hurdles to get over, most of that is waiting for the agent to obtain the background info and for you to test the resulting outputs.

It's not that different from having Claude go to a website and sniff all the API calls it makes as you're interacting with it and then using that info to create a website that you prefer interacting with and all the layers and interactive components that you like.

Adobes moat is being the industry standard, and the wealth of documentation and tutorials and features like integrating with industry standards (printers, cameras, exotic formats). I can't imagine every company going through the hassle to have people relearn their complete stack when hiring new people because the have the n-th possible "adobe replacement" software.

They might if they pay adobe $1-5 million dollars a year. I'd its open source you hire the developer onto your company and have him work on the features you need in the app in house.

That hasn't happened and will not happen.

A company paying $1-5m for software that is reliable, provides support and created by experts in the area will consider that a deal. They go through standard training -- only in case the user hasn't used the software before -- and they're ready to go. By comparison, for your imaginary in-house developer, they'll need to do development (including shit like getting third-party library approvals), support, training etc along with all the overhead. You'll need to have a manager who may know nothing about computer graphics yet need to come up with plans and roadmaps. Users will learn from scratch. I very much doubt it's a one person job and it's worth it in the end.

You probably should actually talk to corporate IT to understand how things work.

Most people are going to use AI to interact with this. I think the notion that Adobe will always be the leader because of content and tutorials is wrong. Why would I watch a tutorial if I could just use MCP and ask LLM how to do something?

Your "most people" are not the target user of Adobe and likely have not purchased Adobe software. Adobe isn't even interested in them.

Especially for professionals who are paid to do their creative work.

Pretty crazy. I think we’re already very numb to AI. Can you imagine seeing something like this pop up 3 years ago? Youd have been dumbfounded and it would have been major news.

Have you tried the apps, or have any experience with Photoshop (complex photo or art or video projects)?

Just curious, because I've worked within design/film etc. for years.

I did open the PhotoCraft and loaded a few of my simpler layout projects. And literally nothing works.

Let's see:

1. Tried to select text, like the selector is off from the cursor.

2. Tried to edit text, takes like 3 seconds to drag the slider for size, nothing happens (text doesn't change size).

3. Absolutely everything is insanely laggy: selecting, switching, etc.

4. Can't seem to expand/collapse folders.

5. Everything shows shortcut keys - shortcut keys don't do anything.

6. Tried to move something, it kind of got frozen for a while. Eventually disappeared I think?

7. Clicked something and it auto selected a side panel (don't know why), hid the other panel, can't stretch, collapse the panels or get it back...

This is actual joke software, I'm confused why you are impressed?

Not surprised, I was super suspicious when I saw this post. Like I bet the underlying image/layout manipulation isn’t that technically challenging at this point, but there is just so much that goes into every single operation from the UI to validations to operation that even with the best use of AI I doubt you could replicate any of the image/video products without several months to a years worth of dedicated effort.

Yes, I would have believed it more if they were targeting one app. But doing all seven at once immediately made me think they likely had no level of care at all (or a giant team?). Today's AI can be impressive but it's not up to adobe-scale apps without a lot of attention and feedback, if you have standards at all. There's a huge surface area to polish in just one of these apps.

I checked GitHub and it has only two committers and four weeks effort: One person +550k lines, another +3k lines.

I didn't even bother downloading any of it to try it out - this is kind of what I expected. Maybe after a massive amount of token spend it'll be somewhat functional?

I did build and run it today and it was functional and without performance issues.

This was on a fresh DNG, not some big existing project.

Perhaps with massive amount of spend it can be brought up to parity to work even for complex Photoshop projects.

I loaded my smallest professional project today with fairly simple shapes and text and a minimal number of large smart objects with few effects (essentially 1 page of an educational web system design).

It's not as bad as a few days ago, however it's extremely slow and lots of little bugs to the point I would never use it professionally. Weird things too, like my entire mouse pointer is slow, drawing with a brush is slow and jaggy, editing a vector and the points don't highlight properly or ending the edit and suddenly it randomly moved somewhere on the screen. Just very clunky, bad feeling and not really usable compared to photoshop.

I'll keep an eye on it out of curiosity, but right now it's unusable in a professional context.

Not experiencing any of these issues today testing with some of my projects. Main issue I see is I'm unable to import Actions.

As many companies, we've started to use AI on a daily-basis. Yet, it didn't cut the need for testing (both automated and manual) and reviewing.

Now here we see a fully blown suite which is already alarming for basic testability.

Also, we had several apps targeting directly at Adobe in the past.

* Blackmagic DaVinci is the biggest, and it also bought several companies to start fusing a one-stop solution.

* Affinity also started with single app that got attention before being swallowed into Canva.

Leaving compatibility and ui-workflow (which is important to existing users), It's much more sane to start and focus on a single app instead of a fully blown package.

From Adobe/Creative Cloud users, I do know Acrobat Pro is one of the problematic apps they have in terms (it freezes, guess a lot of legacy code, etc). And yet, even where there is some competition on PDF editors, Acrobat is still strong also due to UX and features.

I don't think manually QA testing a Photoshop clone is realistic for a single person.

This would either need to become a community effort, or rely on AI's computer use and vision capabilities to align the behavior to the Adobe reference software.

In any case, it's very interesting, and I'm curious if this can become good enough for professional use.

Yeah. It’s expected from a vibe coding project, especially if they care more about the optics than functionality.

I heard from another Photoshop clone that they spent almost a year to polish the software, using AI nonetheless. The hardest part they told me is the getting the color management part right.

That for one app. A full suit with a “written in Rust” tag sounds today almost like a clickbait.

Which clone? Photon? It's not open source, why are creative apps often not open source, unlike other kinds of apps?

Open source is strong in developer tools and where it is complimentary to some other product.

Creative apps don’t fit in either of those categories.

Everyone knows there's a big group of people willing to pay through the nose for good ones so nobody wants to give them away?

Not many people like to work for free

In the AI era nobody has time to use software, they just ask AI to evaluate the app that AI built…

A house of mirrors.

The author has said this is very early stage and from what I can see this has only existed for a week

three days ago he said he one-shotted the entirety of photoshop. he's been promoting this all over reddit. seems odd to then say it's "very early stage"

You expected version 0.2.0 to be perfect?

The fact that this does everything it does is super impressive.

This is the thing. Anyone can one shot an app and accept what Claude does. But to go over every single feature where it gets it wrong, and actually get it to do the correct thing, over all of those tiny details in the program - that’s where the 3 days turns into a year and maybe 3.

There’s a major difference between a polished UI and a polished program.

The fact that a model can get this far is still impressive, and it will probably one shot the program properly in < 3 years.

Maybe it's been updated since his post, but I experience none of these issues in my testing.

Really? I got the 0.7.0 version today and loaded a couple of my projects and tried using it in my normal day-to-day workflow.

1. Can't use brushes because they are slow and render jaggy polygons instead of the beautiful perfectly smooth brushes of Photoshop - literally can't draw a hand-print looking sketch circle as it looks like a weird digital polygon.

2. I use masks for texturing vector layers, literally cannot ctrl+click to select anything in my file because the texture clipped inside of the layer blocks lower layer selection even though it's completley clipped out of view. Makes it impossible to work on my files without going over to the layers and scrolling hundreds of layers and expanding folders to try to find it. This means I can't use it at all.

3. Try to do dumb little things like turn on one of my color modifying layers and it takes 2 seconds to sit there and wait until it activates instead of a few milliseconds like photoshop.

4. Can't activate my fx layer even though it shows that it IS activated and then others show not activated or something... something completely wrong about this, not even sure what.

5. tried to adjust one of my vector layers couldn't hold alt+hover to adjust the point handles.

6. Trying to type text, takes like 1second per character just to type (photoshop is instant).

7. Can't drag UI sections like Navigator/etc. over to the other panels and can't collapse/uncollapse panels.

8. Can't fill/edit the vector path drawing tool at all I don't think, maybe the UI is just weird but definitely a UX issue or just unusable? Not sure...

I'm not going to bother trying more things, but literally every single thing I tested had a bug or is janky to where it's unusable in a professional context.

I do see 100s of people are working on it now with 10s of thousands of stars on github and it does seem a hair better than my first test, so I'll keep watching the progress, but so far it's just too buggy/glitchy/missing features to work with for me (I have a pretty decent Windows pc - nvida rtx 4080 card, 128gb ram, etc).

PDFCraft is awesome. Haven't seen any bugs on it and the updates are still coming.

Don't know if it's buggy or not, but I just opened some large PDFs and I am astonished by its' speed.

I think there's some fatigue with all the brand new projects that have a skeleton of a project up that isn't really usable yet, where the original prompter doesn't bother to finish it off when it gets too hard. There's a lot of noise that doesn't translate to results so far.

I think this project is interesting, but it's more a wait and see what happens kind of thing.

"Built the hard way.

Every Crafting App is written from scratch in Rust and held to the same rules."

Yes. We are numb to AI (slop). Maybe if this project is still being developed in a year people might take it seriously.

Agreed. It’s hard to tell what apps will “survive” other then making a splash, especially since there is a constant reliance on llms with fluctuating costs and seemingly an over reliance on rust being the ideal language for everything.

> I think we’re already very numb to AI.

Yeah, I got totally numb to AI slop. I looked at it and thought, this is surely so broken that nothing works. Came for the comments and the folks who actually had the time to invest in trying it out confirm that nothing works.

I don't think a broken clone of Photoshop would leave me dumbfounded, there's lots of them out there

Honestly the scrollbar is infuriating. Can't expect any better attention to UX from the apps.

I'm sorry! I didn't mean to publish the repos so soon. This project is brand new. There's been a lot of excitement about this, but we have a long way to go.

If this is about the desktop apps and not the website, I'd love it if you could file an issue. We're going to work through everything.

My fault, I shouldn't be putting you down for developing something and making it public. The mix of grandiose with slop is a bit weird and dangerous tho a bit of humbleness would fit well as we know the effort you put to this isn't much yet. Unless you have years of experience in the video/image editing software.

Nobody is beating Adobe with "claude create for me a clone of the adobe suite". Someone that knows what they are doing need to be behind it. It might be you but it would take years of experience if you don't have them yet.

> Nobody is beating Adobe with "claude create for me a clone of the adobe suite".

They're not trying to "beat Adobe" and they certainly didn't wake up one day and tell Claude to make the entire Adobe suite of products.

However, in the not-too-distant future, it'll be the norm to pay $0 for apps and buy AI tokens when needed. That's what Canva did with Affinity--you pay $0 for Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher that are just as good and in some cases better than Adobe's apps.

Access to advanced features and AI requires a subscription.

I'm curious if there are design parents or anything that could put these kinds of projects in legal peril

Nope. UI Design is so well worn and incremental that everything will be disputable, and hence almost never are patents applied for.

Probably easy enough for Adobe to find a few potential things and still shut it down with the threat of lawfare, I'd have thought. They're very wealthy.

Adobe doesn't have to actually win in court. They just have to bankrupt and exhaust their competitors.

> ArtCraft is a form of "fair source" software. It's like free beer in that we give you the code, but there are a few small limitations on what you can do with it.

As seen on the main Artcraft repo. There's other tools that are MIT-licensed, although given that people are noting that this is AI-created the notion of copyright on this is suspect to begin with. Remember kids: all AI slop is born public domain because machines don't have a soul for the purpose of copyright law. And probably also the 13th amendment. Don't upload your brain, kids.

Anyway, let me get up on my soapbox and talk about these "have your cake and eat it too" licenses, that try to be source-available while privileging one particular vendor as the Blessed Owner with special monetization powers. To put it shortly, this doesn't work, because it mixes all the bad parts of FOSS with all the bad parts of proprietary software.

The business model of proprietary software does not work with even source-available terms. Proprietary software is a game of becoming essential to your customers and then taking them for everything they've got. All the successful proprietary companies are, effectively, selling legacy software that was useful to a group of companies a long time ago, but is now so deeply integrated into their IT systems they don't even know they have it until the licensing police show up. "You can use it for free but can't sell it" is anathema to this: it is specifically the "use" part that you're worried about.

Likewise, being able to modify the software - even only for internal uses - means that the proprietary owner has to compete against their own customers for ongoing payments and revenue. Again, if you've dug your talons into a big org to the point where you're indispensable, you don't want your customers making their own forks of your code. You want them paying $$$$/mo for enterprise support.

What FOSS is doing is basically promising to never do these things. If your goal is to make money, then adopting FOSS is like a cat going vegan. And the half-measure source-available licenses don't help, because you wind up conceding all the things that make you money just so you can claim ownership over things most people weren't interested in.

also, from their CLAUDE.md:

> Clean-room. Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Illustrator bundle (names/listings only). Never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names. Behaviour comes from public docs and black-box observation of the running app with synthetic documents only (screenshots by window id, stored under plan/illustrator/screenshots/, never committed). Never copy GPL/AGPL code (Inkscape, lib2geom…).

There is no such thing as clean-room vibe coding. Every line of FOSS code has been trained on. If you use any AI coding model, you are generating code that is going to be similar to copylefted code. There is no "MIT/Apache only" model out there you can use.

Also, no, switching to GPL doesn't help. Actually, it is my opinion that you cannot meaningfully comply with GPL while vibe-coding, because you have changed the definition of "corresponding source code" from a bunch of .rs files to a number of prompts being handed off to a cloud model. Remember: according to GPL, the source code is not "the thing you put into the compiler", it's "the thing the developers prefer to edit to alter the program". Otherwise, you could say "the source code is this uncommented ASM listing" and sidestep the GPL entirely. What we're doing with AI is the same idea, except instead of going down one level of abstraction, we're going up one.

Huh? If ai can ingest books and that is judged as fair use, why is it not the same for code?

It is exactly the same for books as it is for code: as per the Anthropic case, training is fair use. But that case says nothing about the generated outputs. All the Anthropic case did was say, "the legal system refuses to ban AI outright because copyright is not a union and artists are not entitled to collective protection". Individual outputs can still be infringing.

At inference time, there's a whole new legal question: are the specific outputs of the model substantially similar to anything that the LLM had access to? Even if AI training itself was infringement, a specific generated output of that model could be noninfringing anyway. And vice versa, AI training being fair use doesn't form a blanket defense against a specific AI copyright infringement. If you ask the model to create an art program, it could still generate something substantially similar to the code of an existing art program.

In the case of regurgitation[0], the fact that an LLM was involved is immaterial. The only thing the law cares about is if a copy was made somewhere along the chain and if the alleged copy was substantially similar to the purported original. The only thing LLMs do for this analysis is make access to the original far easier to allege, because LLMs are trained on everything.

[0] Inclusive of both model weights and context regurgitation

They usually have terms and conditions to make it YOUR FAULT if you publish something that has copyright, and they have paid loads of legal fees after-the-event for stolen books in their training data. It's never been fair use, just very wealthy people getting away with criminal acts.

Lovable have the following terms, for example - "You assume full responsibility for your use of AI Output and agree not to rely on it for critical or high-risk functions (including medical, legal, financial, or safety-related purposes) without appropriate safeguards. AI Output may be similar or identical to content generated for other users who submit similar prompts. We do not guarantee that AI Output will be unique, free of third-party rights, accurate, suitable for any particular purpose, or that it will build, repair, complete, or improve any application or project or achieve any particular result."

It's wild that anyone still uses Adobe software these days. Adobe is one of the most famous companies for enshittification, and the open-source alternatives are generally very good.

Personally, I switched to open-source alternatives way back in the late 1900s, and they've only continued to improve ever since. Adobe has been lagging behind for over a quarter of a century, in the ways which matter to me, and they keep getting farther behind as they turn to worse and worse methods of extorting money from people.

YMMV, of course.

I can get behind almost anything which reduces lock-in for Adobe's remaining customers, but from what I see in other comments, this probably ain't it. It seems very vibey and buggy. But maybe after more work is put in, it could be good. It looks like it wasn't supposed to go public yet, and they're aware that it's not ready yet.

i personally like affinity better than the FOSS photoshop alternatives, mostly for UX reasons. what i still haven’t found a good replacement for is Lightroom. i use darktable but the way the interface is laid out is antithetical to getting into an efficient flow state. and i say this despite the fact that i consider the output strictly superior to Lightroom (or in fact anything i’ve ever used).

You may also want to look at https://redlamp.app - in pre-alpha but looking very promising!

(Disclosure: I'm the developer)

Oh, best of luck with this, it looks like a great idea. I will test it at some point (gig photos, some studio and outdoor portraiture), can test a bunch of different raw formats.

Thanks, that would be great - the project is under heavy development and is starting to gain some momentum - initial feedback is good!

These things have very different personalities somehow.

Over the years I have tried Capture One — it's fine, I dunno, I just didn't settle with it, even though I shoot a lot of portraits which is its comfort zone. (I actually started out with it, free thing from SanDisk)

I really like DxO Photolab but I know this app enrages lots of people; I particularly like the tone curve handling, FilmPack integration, etc.

Lately I have been learning ART, the RawTherapee fork, and I have to say that despite its very idiosyncratic interface, I like this quite a lot.

It’s actually quite simple, give me any open source alternative and I can give you ten major features it lacks that Photoshop has. If you just use Photoshop as a pixel editing tool, sure, but it does a lot more than that.

I’ve tried getting rid of creative suite for years, but when it comes down to it no competitor has actually come close.

Sure, anyone can list ten features Photoshop has that GIMP, for example, lacks. But it's just as easy to list ten features GIMP has that Photoshop lacks. They're not trying to be the same program.

I see the same argument all the time about Windows vs Linux. Linux lacks this, Linux lacks that, etc... but somehow, people fail to notice that Windows lacks a whole lot of important things that Linux has. Because a Windows user won't be aware of what they're missing. But for me, coming from a Linux background, Windows is missing so much I would view it as unusable.

Changing from one to the other is painful, because of the differences. It's not a drop-in replacement you can keep using exactly the same way. But that doesn't make either one better or worse. They're different, and that's a good thing. But different requires learning, and learning is hard.

Anyway, you're correct that $FreeProgram isn't a drop-in replacement for $ProprietaryProgram. But that's not a valid argument on the relative value of the two programs.

The interesting parts are what is lacking though, not just any feature. A life without smart objects is terrible in photo editing as an example, at least once you’ve seen the upsides. That and Camera Raw actually being an incredibly capable raw conversion engine.

But I’m not trying to convince anyone here, just saying it makes sense people are paying for Adobe software.

Two main things:

Network effects like presets and plugin ecosystem, tutorials and books, team knowledge (you can ask a colleague how to do things).

Switching costs like lightroom catalogues, learning new programs, if it works why fixit.

And the price is not that high if your company pays for it. Open stuff would have to be much better and Adobe much more buggy before most people consider switching.

Three main things: the two you mentioned... and Unmesh Dinda.

I never hear these complaints from creative professionals, only developers.

Developers are also creative professionals.

It's a bit like saying you never hear complaints from piano players, only dentists. But dentists also play piano, just like everyone else. Dentists just know more about teeth than the average pianist.

I think you know what I meant. The people living in Adobe apps.

I only know two or three developers who have a strong concept of what Photoshop does or can do, and all of those only use a fraction of what it does (a couple of layer blend modes, healing brush, soft proofing, maybe image slicing).

There are people who live inside photoshop the way developers live inside VSC or Zed or emacs.

FWIW I do hear these complaints from people who live in Adobe apps but they are very pragmatic about how they approach it. For example, Lightroom is not without its faults but photographers will switch to Capture One and delay leaving the suite so they don't have to relearn everything at once.

Some of those photographers then use their new baseline familiarity with Capture One to test out Affinity for further edits.

But you're just never going to have the time to burn your bridges with the platform in one go. I don't think that is very different from the way developers work; in practice nobody with any serious obligations can simply switch language and toolchain in one go.

So there is attrition, but there is never going to be a threshold over which people cross and get a widespread revolt. I'm not even sure that happened with the switch to Creative Cloud, because they padded that transition by making it easier on photographers and with the other single app plan (that I think no longer exists?)

My own feeling is that there are serious cracks in the way Photoshop works. For example the "smart objects" bodge when they could do what Affinity Photo does with live filter layers, not to mention (when comparing with Affinity) Photoshop's weaker layer blend controls, lack of cross-model curves, lack of a frequency separation tool, culture of over-reliance on plugins.

But Photoshop has things Affinity does not, yet — a mature DAM/Bridge integration, some of the more advanced warp tools, etc., and tiny details like better perlin noise generation.

So it's like the situation with Word, isn't it — 95% of people use only a tiny fraction of what Word can do, but they don't all use the same tiny fraction.

People have their reasons to switch or not switch; even among hobbyist photographers who complain about the cost of everything else, the price of the photography plan does not seem to be one of them (thanks in part to Adobe's strategic reliance on Amazon Prime Day/Deal Days bundles)

I used to be much more aggressively anti-Adobe than I am now. I am never going to use Creative Cloud again myself, mind you, because I do not need anything it uniquely does anymore.

I’m skeptical.

The most interesting part to me is their PDF stuff, as that has been at times somewhat lackluster on Linux, and there's this huge huge huge existing base of non-artists that could benefit from something like that.

I'm not sure if it really makes sense to copy the UI and visual language of the source that verbatim (and I believe that Adobe will rightfully retaliate on specifically that), but for the time being, that's neat.

I bet the industry didn't expect that their IP laundering tools would eventually launder their own IP.

No IP for Adobe to retaliate on. None of the UI is patentable.

Can't believe HN sentiment is taking adobe's side over open source, just because the latter used AI.

The projects proposed couldn't be further away from the FOSS bubble with its ideas, values and spirit.

It is - effectively - exactly the same in spirit as Adobe. It's just business people fighting each other.

Which is nice don't get me wrong, but it's a different kind of nice.

Phrased differently and more inflammatory, the F in Foss does not mean fraud and hopefully never will. This however is just that. Defrauding someone out of their unjustified monopoly through GPU compute instead of merit.

Look at it. It is an identical recreation created in bad faith with zero additional creativity put into it.

It is "I want this, but I don't like that it is yours. I will take it".

___

Just because Adobe sucks doesn't mean that someone capable of doing that and doing it this blatantly would be trustworthy and "on our side".

In fact, given all what I've seen, I'd predict that this guy in particular will just rugpull people even harder than adobe could ever do, given that they have the inertia and friction of being a large corp softening and slowing down the blows they could deal.

Who took Adobe's side? Pointing out their behavior isn't an endorsement

I tried their photoshop "equivalent" and it's a piece of garbage. Essentially nothing works. I'm sure it will improve but as of right now I would be pretty embarrassed to put something out that works so poorly.

Pretty sure it's listed as "Alpha" on the github.

Usually an "alpha" implies it's at least partially working, even if it's quite buggy.

nope. alpha means it is unusable as is and in early stage of development.

It's AI slop, so it ain't going to improve without a complete 100% human rewrite

Tested it: very broken software produced by AI. The title and description is so far away from the truth you may well call it deceptive.

I'm struggling with the audience? The main thing about Adobe right now is millions of hours of youtube videos that show me how to do stuff. I would be completely lost with this software

I haven't had a chance to use it, how are you lost?

If you have an LLM and MCP why do you need a tutorial? Why would I watch a tutorial when the LLM can tell me how to use a feature? There is not a moat just because there are tutorials. That moat is gone. I don't need to watch tutorials anymore.

This is exactly how you end up with AI slop. If all you do is command AI to do things without understanding anything the result is always the same.

The idea is “watch this tutorial and do plugins for ArtCraft that do the same nut easier, and make me a tutorial to use them”

You can pass a youtube video of a tutorial directly to LLM, LLM can then use MCP to do what the tutorial says.

Really? The creator said this three days ago

> Software is over. But for real. I just one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing.

You're telling me it's not the entirety of photoshop?

I wasn't ready for this to be posted on HN, but this is moving so fast.

99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years.

Feel free to check in on this claim. It's measurable.

Disregard the haters. They were here yelling about how bun rewrite would never work and yet it's done in a couple of weeks.

Thank you.

There are some incredibly smart people on HN, but I wasn't quite ready for this project to face the firing squad. It's still much too new for the world's harshest critics.

With lots of additional effort, I expect this to succeed much like bun. Fingers crossed.

I sympathize.

Obviously you don't need to pay for Photoshop anymore. Does that mean your product is the replacement? No. Just an example.

The fact that you or anyone can get to 95-99% very quickly. The rest can be added over time at a very high pace and some "actual effort".

Unless Photoshop can add some sort of proprietary features then why use them? (they have been doing this with AI features mostly, but it should still all be copyable)

> The fact that you or anyone can get to 95-99% very quickly.

fact? what fact? have people lost their fucking minds here?

This is not even 1% of Photoshop yet. They won't get to 95% in a lifetime or 10.

the "photoshop equivalent" is really broken at a fundamental level. I can't do ANYTHING I tried to do. I'm sure it sort of works but the basics aren't there. Have you tried using it yourself?

The Bun rewrite is qualitatively different, is it not? It's a source to source conversion.

Yes, it is, but it was deemed impossible as well.

by all the same people who are questioning this slop or ?

Haters and people that are denying the reality, so basically flat earthers at this point.

Did the Bun rewrite work? I'm seeing some absolutely terrifying bugs in the GitHub issues, although for all I know they were in the old code, too.

Looks like. Claude Code uses it.

I mean Claude Code is one of the most buggy piece of software in existence, so I wouldn't use that as a measurement. There's also massive marketing forces in play here that can't be ignored.

you posted this on multiple subreddits and claimed "We're going to reach 100% parity within a month."

and now it's not ready for HN? what happened in the last 24 hours for that to be the case?

i look forward to a beta release of all 7 softwares with 99% feature parity november 5th.

Reddit isn't HN.

I needed to seed a community that could help contribute bug reports and PRs.

I had no intention of posting a thread here until it was more mature, because I knew this would be the response.

For what it's worth, kudos. This is very good use of ai, and bun proves that it is weeks to months till this hits stability.

The haters aren't seeing the direction, and proven examples.

In what way does Bun prove this?

Bun was a conversion of the source code to a different language.

what proven examples? lmao

The direction is going to be mostly about money and legality, I'd have thought.

This will certainly be a good test of the latter. Adobe are very wealthy, and presumably one of the enterprise customers AI companies want to get.

Vibe coders just drain them money and will never pay API prices.

But who will win?

> I needed to seed a community that could help contribute bug reports and PRs.

Holy shit dude you cannot possibly just say out loud that you're using people.

I know that AI makes you feel like god, but this is the style of communication that will be quoted against you. If you truly want to play this game (which I _highly_ recommend you shouldn't) then you must absolutely step that up.

why? Microsoft used Vista to test Windows 7.

seems completely normal to release free beta software and ask for feedback.

You posted this in a comment on HN three days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934844

And then four days ago:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922904

And you've mentioned ArtCraft numerous times https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Aechelon+artcraft

Obviously you've been trying to get traction on this for a while. You can't claim that you "one-shotted photoshop" and then drop links and act surprised when someone decides to test that claim.

I didn't post a thread, ffs. I don't know why you're all jumping me, haha.

Calm down and be patient. Let the community token spend have time to diffuse into the products.

This effort needs a community to climb the quality and parity gradients. But I'm not ready to really show it off until we've hit some thresholds.

I've got the attention I needed to bootstrap this, so I can go back to work.

Bro, you don't get to ask for calm and patience when you make claims like "software is over. But for real. I just one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing." and then post your repo in various subreddits and HN comments. You did ask for this, whether you have the self-awareness to realize it or not.

But look on the bright side, this is a chance to prove all of the haters wrong. Given your enthusiasm about AI and its capabilities it shouldn't be an issue.

Based take

I see, I was wondering why you did not post it to HN and only mentioned it in comments.

Makes perfect sense to me, since this is obviously an early alpha version.

It already looks very impressive to me, and I look forward to the project proving these doubters wrong.

I hope there will not be legal trouble with Adobe.

Would be interesting if you honestly documented as to if/when it starts breaking old things as you add new features.

scbench.ai suggests this will happen on projects where the human is no longer in the loop, and it's a good sized project to find out.

The more interesting part is that people "release" this "products" and market it even if were like version 1.

Indeed — what I am reading of this strongly suggests a misunderstanding about exactly what it is that makes Photoshop what it is.

I think it might be possible to slop-code an Excel clone because — truly minor interactivity quibbles aside — it can be tested with a truly exhaustive suite. The clone can be proved to do what it is supposed to do, over whatever subset one would choose to implement.

But Photoshop is not an application in the same way that Excel is an application.

(Not least because while powerful, Excel, like Word, is an implementation of an existing idea. Photoshop is the OG; it has all the history of the OG)

Photoshop is also a surface and a medium. It has a feel, it has responsiveness. It's like oil painting or watercolour: its own thing, with its own pen/brush dynamics, its own interactivity.

Part of the reason people don't want to switch away to Affinity (even though Affinity is free as in beer, highly capable and in some ways better) is just that to a set of very hardcore users, it does not have this feel. They just don't like how it feels.

Automated testing that focusses on pixel-precise rendering misses the point. It may actually matter less that it renders PSDs pixel-accurately than that it actually feels right.

If you are not convinced by my argument, look at "dodge and burn retouching". For better or worse, high end fashion photo retouching is done in an extremely precise, wildly technical, tiny subset of Photoshop tools.

If you want to replace Photoshop it has to be responsive at that level. And since that level is partly subjective experience, it's going to take some people.

oh c'mon, this thing IS garbage but it's completely possible to build a good one with AI, it just takes craftsmanship which is the part the dude spent no time on.

Not with the kind of vibe coded automatic testing they are talking about, though.

You really need to sit down with a Photoshop user to see how they feel about it and how they approach alternatives; it took me no time to adapt from Photoshop + Wacom tablet to Affinity Photo + Wacom tablet, but I know photographers who won't because it's "not right".

Serif had more luck converting Illustrator users to Affinity Designer, and made the right decision to release Designer first, because Illustrator users were much more frustrated with Adobe, and because giving those users what they wanted helped get past the way the app does not "feel" exactly the same.

There is no way that a "pixel-accurate compliance" test suite can capture what it is that makes these applications the way they are.

to make a complete copy of photoshop you just need computer use, which this clearly didn't do.

did you test it? the photo application opened a photo, pinch to zoom worked, the menus are full of buttons. it seems like the features i tested worked. they are mostly in similar spots as photoshop/photopea.

its a little impressive that models have a compressed approximation of photoshop inside that works with minimal tinkering.

the icon for windows doesnt work.

I tested it, I did different things and nothing worked right.

Office apps are strictly based on written spec. You can if spend good amount of token could easily build something very close not but 100% with that spec. PS is a different animal.

Worked with Excel’s spec for years the actual behavior has plenty of quirks that aren’t covered by the spec, so cloning it isn’t as easy as it sounds and I believe its the same with Adobe products

Adobe dont even have published specs.

That "feel" is how drawing algorithms work, how responsive the interface is and so on. You can do automatic testing for that as well.

I played a bit with porting NES games with an older Claude. It just wrote tests not just for pixel perfectness, but for frames, timing and so on.

Sure Adobe will fight anyone that tries to do that openly, but historically such attempts failed in a grand scheme of things. Stopping a single project like this, even if you manage to trace down the devs, is a years long litigation - and in that time such project gets enough adoption to demolish the incumbent. And when one project dies, five other spawn in its place.

> what I am reading of this strongly suggests a misunderstanding about exactly what it is that makes Photoshop what it is.

do you mean marketing and market manipulation by encouraging piracy by young people and student so they develop habits with the software then force companies to buy the subscription ?

honestly, for what it is, it aint too bad, to think ai did this in this short of a time, im actually stoked on what the project could become.

I want to leave adobe for good and this LightCraft thing does what no other alternative can, Presets from lightroom.

if the creator fixes Masks and uses local ai possibilities for masking and such, this could very fast result in me canceling my sub.

So far yes its a vibe-coded mess but your crazy telling me adobes hella broken software is better.

Be sure to provide feedback for the project, actual field experience is the most valuable thing you can have right now.

Every piece of beta software that has ever existed, has bugs. AI doesn't change this. Software development has largely changed to build with AI first, get basic things working, iterate and fix. This is just the reality older developers just have to accept.

Bugs are ever present. And beta software should be treated with charity. But Photoshop, let alone the entire suite, is a beast. An effort, like this says it is, aiming for parity fundamentally misunderstands the reality of both the software they’re trying to replicate and the capability of AI assistance now and in the foreseeable suitable future

The question is how much of that beast is really necessary for a true MVP. My bet is that you can have a stable core of Photoshop, and an option for designers to easily add/port plugins for whatever is necessary for their specific workflows.

We see that already with CMSes and CRMs. Sure Wordpress is a beast, but the vast majority of that complexity comes from it being universal.

I've seen non-technical people building their CMSes and even CRMs for small businesses within a fraction of time it would take them to set up the off the shelf product. The biggest challenge there is security of course - but Photoshop clones don't have to deal with it too much.

My bet is that in single months we will have a stable clone of the Photoshop core, and with an ability to easily modify it, designers will just build their own custom plugins to fit their workflows better than PS ever could.

Unlike CMS/CRMs the cost of switch/testing out is minimal. You don't need to switch the whole company to it, you don't have security issues, and if it's too buggy you just switch back.

Also, this is a way for graphic designers to maintain their relevance - if they can have full controls of their tools, they can do the work faster and better and maintain their creative freedom.

Very late to this but for what it's worth I stumbled upon this and tested their release from earlier today and it seems basically fine. Everything I've tried works except for popping out panels (like the history panel, layers panel, etc) which doesn't appear to be supported. Not sure what was broken for you since you neglected to elaborate, but if things weren't working for you right up front then it must be iterating quickly. Not saying this to brag or to take a stance on it or anything, just observing.

Yes, I build and ran the photoshop clone on my Mac just now, and it seemed mostly fine.

For the problems I did face, I am not sure if they were bugs in the software or just me not being familiar with Photoshop with the Mac's touchpad controls.

I'd think this project kind of settles whether one can build large, working software with AI, for those that were still unconvinced.

I am surprised this has not seen more discussion on HN. The post is flagged.

Tested it just now six days later, and it's doing what I need very handily. I'm impressed!

... brought to you by storyteller.ai, which now has a defunct hero video, but apparently still 10 mio users (at $12+ monthly). I very much applaud them for pouring their (est.) $1.4B ARR into Open Source.

Given the vibes i have very little hope, but i have to have some hope, because at this point I've been waiting my whole life for an open source InDesign competitor (no, scribus is not competitive)

Hopefully the suite will not be abandoned in one month, and it'll become actually production-ready one day. Although this seems like slop for now (at least it's rust, not electron), enough contributions may (hopefully) make it worth something.

Kinda nuts, UI does feel like babby's first software project but it is somewhat functional, as far as I can tell (not an artist though). It's more like advanced Paint.NET than professional software like Krita let alone Photoshop, but still pretty impressive for AI. Honestly I'm scared what the slop future will bring.

I just tried editing a PSD with a smart object and the result was completely broken. It works much better in Photopea, a web app that was released 13 years ago.

Just tried it, and it actually works surprisingly well. Only tried the Photoshop clone though.

No thanks. I use https://www.photopea.com/ .

I think Adobe I will quickly lean into Content Credentials, across the entire creative suite workflow.

Anything created in an Adobe product has a hash and is synced to their cloud. Opening any asset in an Adobe product without Adobe content credentials is blocked entirely as it’s ‘not verified’.

Any real business that uses Adobe software will be locked into it and it will shut out things like this from competing in a commercial sense.

It enforces the idea that only Adobe can validate the authenticity and origin of an asset, as well as builds a moat.

They could easily roll it out, it introduces more friction from a creative production point of view but they may have no choice now…

>Anything created in an Adobe product has a hash and is synced to their cloud. Opening any asset in an Adobe product without Adobe content credentials is blocked entirely as it’s ‘not verified’.

Doesnt this address the wrong thing?

The risk is people migrating from Adobe to open source clones.

This solution sounds like it would prevent people from migrating to Adobe from open source clones.

So what?

>It enforces the idea that only Adobe can validate the authenticity and origin of an asset

Why would a user who wants to edit a photo need Adobe to do that?

I work as a designer, I use a lot of their tools at a professional level. My perspective is from a place where Adobe software is embedded in processes, I could change my software but I will receive assets that will be done with the latest tools. Likewise I could supply files from these tools but then the person receding it may not be able to use them. I’m sure there are a lot of people using bits of Adobe software but there are much more using it in a career and it would be impossible to switch and there’s an opportunity for Adobe to turn the screw and lock down the processes in the creative pipeline.

That would be pretty much anti-competitive and illegal.

How does the saying go? If you run an infinite number of coding agents in an infinite number of terminals for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete Adobe Creative Suite.

I ran the photoshop thing and:

1. the advanced options for brush smoothing didn't work

2. tried to draw shapes and i couldn't actually see the shapes as i was drawing them

someone with llm psychosis and too many tokens has bitten off more than they can chew

just wait and check back in a month, it will be reposted here for sure.

It's a first version / proof of concept. Wikipedia was also crap at the beginning, so was most of the modern software.

You have millions of designers pissed at Adobe that just saw a chance to get free of them. And llms that went from "barely can write a script" a year ago to "can do a buggy reimplementation of a photoshop" now.

There is no scenario where in a year we don't have a stable replica of the core PS. With an option to vibe code plugins to what whoever needs to work properly.

It's built with AI? Automatic slop.

I'll have to do more research in this but I'm curious what prompts they used and if they had a software development/clean room background because the videos I've been watching and content covering the first version of this said it was very painful/ a lot of things were broken. Sure AI does some testing, but are people using slicers with their UIs to make sure things match? Are people checking these things to see they do what is intended?

It's always like this with AI-generated stuff. First impression is always good and it's "almost" like a Photoshop. But it's down to details, flows and all the stuff that normally works in PS but suddenly breaks in all those copies.. I think there might be time when AI will do huge and complex apps like this, but it's definetely not this time yet. And we are not even close

I get its imperfect, but I pay for Adobe Acrobat to work on legal documents (infrequent, but frequent enough that I have to pay), and PdfCraft works well enough for me that I cancelled my subscription.