ArtCraft

ArtCraft grew out of Storyteller, an AI creative company that Brandon Thomas founded in Atlanta in 2022 and led as chief executive; it received an investment from venture firm Pebblebed in 2023. At the time, Storyteller offered tools for video creators such as text-to-speech, voice-to-voice conversion and voice design.⁠[1][1][1]

Thomas founded ArtCraft in 2025, initially positioning it as “controllable AI” for artists, a tool for precise editing after AI images and videos are generated. In November 2025 he introduced ArtCraft on Hacker News as a source-available “AdobeAdobeAdobe (Adobe Inc.) is a software company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Known for PostScript, PDF and creative software such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, it moved its main creative products to Creative Cloud subscriptions from 2013 and expanded into digital marketing and generative AI; it is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ADBE.Open the full entry + AI”: users can log in directly to AI image and video services and use their own accounts. He said that, unlike “model aggregator” websites such as HiggsfieldHiggsfieldHiggsfield is an AI visual-content company founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco. Beginning with the Diffuse mobile app, it developed a browser-based production platform for creators, marketing teams and enterprises, combining proprietary and third-party models for images, video, storyboards, character consistency and multi-step creative work.Open the full entry, ArtCraft is a desktop app written in Rust that users can keep, and argued that text prompting is a poor fit for artists and designers.⁠[2][3][4][4][4][4]

On January 16, 2026, ArtCraft launched its official blog; on January 30 it published “Machinima 2.0,” describing how to use 3D scenes and world models to keep locations consistent in AI films. In the post, the team described themselves as old-school photons-on-glass filmmakers and called text a poor representation of the physical world.⁠[5][6][5][7][7][7]

On January 31, Thomas introduced ArtCraft in a “Show HN” post on Hacker News, linking its GitHub repository storytold/artcraft and saying that ArtCraft is “fair source” and that he hoped to follow CockroachDB in eventually raising funding while keeping the tool’s source fully available. On February 2, ArtCraft posted a job listing on Hacker News, saying it was building an open-source AI image and video crafting tool aimed at taking on software such as Adobe, Figma and Blender, and that its founding team consisted of filmmakers, VFX engineers and others passionate about the field.⁠[8][8][9][9]

In April 2026, Thomas said ArtCraft had a lot of users and was picking up steam, and that the team was building bring-your-own-key and open-source model routing services. In July, ArtCraft advertised for a backend engineer, remote or onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area or Atlanta; the listing said ArtCraft’s services and desktop app are written in Rust, that the desktop app currently uses Tauri with plans for a fully native interface in Bevy, that the backend uses Actix Web and SQLx, and that the team leverages Claude Code extensively but still wants code that humans can maintain.⁠[10][10][11][11][11]

The earliest code of PhotoCraft, the Photoshop look-alike, is dated September 30, 2026. On October 1, 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 open-source implementations of Adobe’s entire suite and listed 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), saying he had been bitten by Adobe’s subscription “cancellation fee” one too many times.⁠[12][13][14][14][14][14]

Over the weekend of October 3–4, ArtCraft formally pivoted to this suite of open-source applications; on October 4 a user submitted the site’s Crafting Apps page to Hacker News, and on October 5 the Japanese tech outlet GIGAZINE was first to report on it. Thomas also announced the apps in Adobe-related communities as Reddit user u/ai_art_is_art, calling them Rust “clean-room” replacements that use no Adobe code, with WebAssembly versions that run in a browser; some of the posts were later removed.⁠[3][15][16][17][3][18]

Thomas said development of the completely free apps, released under the MIT or Apache licenses, would be funded by selling token-based access to ArtCraft’s existing visual AI model and IDE, so they would not become “some orphaned small-team project.” ArtCraft co-founder Michael Caffrey said the team had first used Claude to reverse-engineer the seven most popular Adobe tools, was surprised by how well they worked internally, and decided to open-source them.⁠[3][3][19][19]

Several tech outlets tried the apps. Gizmodo’s Mike Pearl found that common commands in PhotoCraft were where he expected them, but that Free Transform was an unpredictable mixed bag, and said it “feels like using glitchy, but real, Photoshop.” OMG! Ubuntu’s Joey Sneddon found PhotoCraft uncannily close to Photoshop in its interface, with layers, masks, smart objects and PSD support, but said its results still fall short of Photoshop and that “it won’t replace Photoshop for pros”; he also noted that version 0.1.0 had been released only five days earlier and version 0.5.0 was already out.⁠[20][20][20][21][21][21][21][21][21]

Tedium’s Ernie Smith found the apps fast and small but said many finicky details did not work well. TechRadar’s Steve Paris noted that PhotoCraft and FilmCraft were only about 80 MB and 90 MB, compared with 6.4 GB for Photoshop on his machine, but concluded that the project involved “a heck of a lot of overpromising and a huge amount of underdelivering,” with slow apps and missing crucial features. After testing LightCraft, PhotoCraft and FilmCraft on October 13, Creative Bloq’s Joe Foley said installation required no account, but LightCraft’s sharpening was harsh and FilmCraft could not play 10-bit 4:2:2 footage or open Premiere project files, concluding that ArtCraft was not yet stable or complete enough to replace existing software.⁠[22][22][23][23][23][23][24][24][24][24]

Community reaction was polarized: some commenters called the project piracy and warned of an Adobe lawsuit, while responses said it was a clean-room reimplementation that did not use or copy Adobe source code; others worried that one person generating large amounts of code with AI in a short time could hardly verify privacy, malicious code and file-handling risks. Ars Technica noted that reverse engineering has generally been found legally acceptable, but that the apps could still face legal trouble if their “trade dress” too closely mimics Adobe’s. Creative Bloq’s Daniel John questioned whether professional creatives would trust their files and livelihoods to AI-generated software.⁠[18][18][18][3][25]

On October 10, Thomas said on Hacker News that the ArtCraft apps were built with vanilla Claude Code and that the team was especially 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; lawyer Neil Brown said reimplementers “may well argue” their work is non-infringing.⁠[26][17][17][12]

In October 2026, ArtCraft also released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, modeled on Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, likewise developed with Claude and free to download from ArtCraft’s GitHub. The three apps reached version 0.5.0 on October 10 and 11, with installers for Windows, Mac and Linux, and can open and save .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files; the developers estimated GridCraft at about 50% and WordCraft at about 60% ready for real work, and acknowledged that none of the three can yet replace Microsoft 365.⁠[27][27][28][28][28][29][28][28][28]

The ArtCraft studio calls itself “the IDE for artists,” built for interactive AI image and video creation: users can composite layers and remove backgrounds on a 2D canvas, place characters, props and cameras in a 3D scene, turn images into locations or 3D meshes, and then have a chosen model render the result. According to the project, ArtCraft has its own catalog of 62 image, video, music, 3D mesh and world models and can also connect to services such as Grok, MidjourneyMidjourneyMidjourney is a self-funded artificial intelligence research lab founded in San Francisco by David Holz, best known for its namesake text-to-image service, which opened to the public through Discord in 2022 and later expanded to the web, video models, and medical hardware. It has been sued by artists and by companies including Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery over copyright issues involving its training data and generated content.Open the full entry, Sora and World Labs.⁠[30][30][31][31][31][30][30][30][30]

As of October 14, 2026, the ArtCraft desktop app was at version 0.41.0, supporting Windows 10 (64-bit) or newer and macOS 12.0 or newer, with a web version also available. ArtCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0 and can be used without a subscription, with users bringing their own compute and third-party subscriptions; paid Basic, Pro and Max plans cost $10, $35 and $60 per month, and an enterprise plan is also offered.⁠[32][32][32][31][30][33][33][33][33][33]

As of October 14, 2026, the ArtCraft website listed 13 Crafting Apps covering image editing, vector illustration, video editing, photo management, PDFs, motion graphics, page layout, interface design, word processing, audio, presentations, CAD and spreadsheets; PhotoCraft, PdfCraft and FigCraft were marked early alpha and the rest in development. The project says every app is written from scratch in Rust, open-sourced under permissive licenses, compiled into native desktop apps rather than Electron or web-view shells, processes files locally, can be driven by AI agents through a command line, a JSON control channel or an MCP server, and in most cases also compiles to WebAssembly to run in a browser.⁠[34][34][34][35][36][34][34][34][34][34][34][34][34]

Each app’s repository describes it as a “clean-room reimplementation” of the corresponding Adobe software. PhotoCraft’s contributor rules call for studying Photoshop and other proprietary software for behavior and look only, never copying their code, shaders or assets, and implementing features from public specifications such as PSD, ICC and ISO 32000 and from observation; LightCraft forbids reading Adobe binaries, and PdfCraft states that its behavior comes from the ISO 32000 specification and black-box observation. The ArtCraft name and logos are not covered by the open-source licenses.⁠[37][38][38][39][40][38]

The project also publishes its gaps relative to the target software: PhotoCraft’s documentation admits it “is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work,” and the October 13, 2026, version of its roadmap estimated that version 0.6.0 had about 76% of Photoshop 2026’s feature breadth and was about 45% ready for real work, calculating remaining effort in Opus 5.5 agent hours calibrated on the repository’s 1,004 merged pull requests.⁠[37][41][41][41][41][41][41][41]

ArtCraft: Official website: https://getartcraft.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[42]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/storytold (opens in a new window)⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/get_artcraft (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public account: https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialArtCraftStudios (opens in a new window)⁠[30]