Brandon Thomas

Brandon Thomas says that in college he built laser games on skyscrapers and cloned the luciferase-luciferin system into plants via agrobacterium-mediated transfection. He recalls that he had planned to go to graduate school for computational biology, but an early Square engineer saw him working on something he had built beside a Waffle House at 2 or 3 a.m. and, after about six months of conversations, convinced him to join Square; he says he got in early and had a very good exit, which completely changed the course of his life.⁠[1][2][2]

He says he worked on large-scale active-active, five-nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily; he recalls that Square began as a single Ruby on RailsRuby on RailsRuby on Rails (often shortened to Rails) is an open-source, full-stack web application framework written in the Ruby programming language that builds database-backed web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson and first publicly released in 2004, it is known for design principles such as “convention over configuration,” and companies including GitHub and Shopify use it in production.Open the full entry monolith and spent a decade rebuilding it into a Java and Go microservice architecture.⁠[3][4]

Thomas’s other interest is film. He says he has made many independent films over more than a decade, worked on more than a dozen films, served as assistant director and handled logistics, and has always focused on film technology such as volumetric video and motion capture; during the COVID-19 pandemic he bought about $50,000 worth of motion capture equipment to keep shooting virtually.⁠[2][5][5][5]

Thomas built the AI speech synthesis website FakeYou as a side project, letting users make favorite characters “say” things with deepfake technology; after it took off, he quit his fintech job, added monetization and broadened the business. He says FakeYou had 6.5 million monthly users at its peak and was used by PewDiePie and some musicians, but because it lacked zero-shot and fine-tuning capabilities, it was quickly overtaken when ElevenLabs arrived.⁠[6][7][7][8][8]

In 2022, Thomas founded the AI creative company Storyteller (Storyteller.ai) in Atlanta and served as its chief executive; the company received an investment from venture firm Pebblebed in 2023 and offered tools for video creators such as text-to-speech and voice-to-voice conversion. In March 2023 he said he had been building the Storyteller.ai platform for a year and planned to launch it soon, using a stack of Rust, Unreal, PyTorch and Kubernetes. He recalls that the team built a 3D nonlinear video editor that let users control AI animation with motion capture gear and timelines, but Luma Labs’ Dream Machine came out a few weeks after its launch and completely overtook that approach.⁠[9][9][9][7][7][8][8]

Thomas founded ArtCraft in 2025, saying he originally built it for himself, friends and colleagues. In November 2025 he introduced ArtCraft on Hacker News as a source-available “Adobe + AI” desktop application written in Rust, suited to filmmaking that requires consistent, deliberate scene blocking; users can log in directly to AI image and video services and use their own accounts.⁠[10][10][11][11][11][11]

On January 31, 2026, Thomas introduced ArtCraft in a “Show HN” post on Hacker News, describing himself as a photons-on-glass filmmaker for more than ten years and calling AI the personal computer moment for film; he explained that ArtCraft is “fair source” and that he hoped to follow CockroachDB in eventually raising funding while keeping the tool’s source fully available. The same month, he said on Hacker News that he was getting ten times as much work done with AI as before and that Claude writes reasonable Rust, Java and C++ code.⁠[12][12][12][3][3]

Thomas later said he had coded exclusively with AI tools since February 2026. In August he said on Hacker News that several films made with ArtCraft would be released in theaters and that he was working on reboots of several popular animated series from the 1980s and 1990s, with full licensing and the original authors on board.⁠[13][5][5]

On September 21, 2026, Thomas published the essay “Spymarks, not Watermarks” on his personal website, proposing the term “spymark” for hidden signals that make people’s work traceable without their knowledge, to distinguish them from visible, benign traditional watermarks; citing Google’s SynthID as an example, he argued that such technology can embed database identifiers linked to users’ identities and poses risks to groups such as whistleblowers.⁠[14][15][15][15][15][15][15]

On October 1, 2026, Thomas wrote on Hacker News that “software is over” and that he had “one-shotted Photoshop.” The next day he said he was using Opus 5.5 to write 100% pure-Rust, immediate-mode-rendering open-source implementations of Adobe’s entire suite, listing seven repositories: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere), LightCraft (Lightroom), PrintCraft (Acrobat Pro), EffectCraft (After EffectsAdobe After EffectsAdobe After Effects is Adobe’s desktop software for motion graphics, compositing and visual effects. It was developed by CoSA, a start-up in Providence, Rhode Island, which released version 1.0 in January 1993; it became an Adobe product after Aldus acquired CoSA and Aldus merged into Adobe, and in 2019 its principal developers received a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Open the full entry) and DesignCraft (InDesign). He said he had been bitten by the dark pattern of Adobe’s subscription “cancellation fee” one too many times and that AI would let people “take back the internet,” rebuilding search engines, smartphones and infrastructure.⁠[16][17][17][17][17][17][17]

Thomas announced the applications in Adobe-related communities as Reddit user u/ai_art_is_art, and some of the posts were later removed. In them he described himself as a “15-year industry veteran,” not a casual “vibe coder,” who had written six-nines payment systems moving billions of dollars of transactions a day as well as advanced robotics and optics automation, had used Rust for about a decade, and said the applications were “clean-room” replacements that use no Adobe code. He initially promised 100% feature parity within a month, then a few days later said that “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years,” acknowledged that the applications were in early alpha and “not anywhere close to ready,” and said he would pay bug bounties to contributors.⁠[18][18][19][20][20][20][13][13][21][21]

Responding to criticism such as “vibe coding,” Thomas posted on X on October 9 that he can code and said AI models let him work as an entire company. On October 10 he said on Hacker News that the ArtCraft applications were built with vanilla Claude Code and that the team was careful not to touch the reverse engineering tool Ghidra, to avoid copyright infringement from decompilation or reverse engineering. Andres Guadamuz, an intellectual property scholar at the University of Sussex, said it was still unclear how much of the code Claude wrote and how much Thomas wrote, and whether the claimed “clean-room process” stands up to scrutiny.⁠[1][1][22][23][19][19]

In October 2026, Thomas also released, through ArtCraft, the open-source applications GridCraft, DeckCraft and WordCraft, modeled on Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word, likewise developed with Claude and free to download.⁠[22][24]

Personal website: https://brand.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[25][26]

ArtCraft: Official website: https://getartcraft.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[27]

X: Public account: https://x.com/echelon (opens in a new window)⁠[25]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/echelon (opens in a new window)⁠[9][27]