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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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'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.
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?
I checked GitHub and it has only two committers and four weeks effort: One person +550k lines, another +3k lines.
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.
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.
A house of mirrors.
I think this project is interesting, but it's more a wait and see what happens kind of thing.
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.
Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction
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.
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.
What about their service?
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.
The Adobe apps are 100% open source, desktop, MIT, no telemetry.
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft etc.
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.
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.
I’ve tried getting rid of creative suite for years, but when it comes down to it no competitor has actually come close.
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)
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...
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.
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/
https://github.com/storytold
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
Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.
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.
Now that being said, Adobe has plenty of non-standardized file formats that they absolutely could do AutoCAD-style shenanigans with.
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.
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'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
we remember different 1999s. i remember everyone pirating software made by large companies at that moment in time
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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
I'll be pinging you about this in the future
I look forward to the beta and beyond!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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