Shokunin Studio

The earliest post visible on the Shokunin Studio website’s blog was published on January 21, 2018, titled “Getting it right requires time...and feedback”; between then and 2023 the blog was updated only occasionally, with posts touching on a videotape from its author’s film school days and on novel writing.⁠[1]

On January 21, 2024, the blog published a post arguing that claims that “AI will replace” most jobs do not hold up, contending that many sectors already operate at high efficiency, that automation changes how people work rather than how much, and stressing the value of connections, tradition and craft.⁠[2]

On February 15 of the same year, after OpenAI unveiled its text-to-video tool Sora, the blog wrote that errors and artefacts in generated footage are hard to hide on a big screen and argued that the film industry and location shooting would not disappear as a result.⁠[3]

On February 18, 2026, the blog responded to online claims that the video-generation model Seedance 2.0 would make Hollywood obsolete, arguing that a widely shared clip likely relied on live green-screen performances used as video input and that the model still showed common problems such as garbled text and morphing faces; the author stated that he writes not against AI itself but against the hyperbole surrounding it.⁠[4]

On September 12, 2026, the blog published “Vibe coders are exploiting the animation community,” arguing that among animation and video apps built quickly through AI “vibe coding,” many developers pursue short-term profit rather than software quality; the post listed what it called warning signs, including releasing buggy software under a “beta” label, unsigned apps that trigger virus warnings, and the use of paid promotion and bot accounts to build hype.⁠[5]

The post also said that some projects used AI to reverse-engineer the file formats of Krita, TVPaint and Clip Studio Paint, which could lead to lost layers or corrupted images.⁠[5]

Around October 8, 2026, developer Brandon ThomasBrandon ThomasBrandon Thomas is a software engineer, entrepreneur and independent filmmaker based in Atlanta who formerly worked as an engineer at Square and founded the speech synthesis website FakeYou, the AI creative company Storyteller.ai and the open-source AI image and video tool ArtCraft. In October 2026, under the ArtCraft name, he released seven open-source Rust applications modeled on Adobe’s main programs, saying they were written with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, drawing attention and controversy.Open the full entry publicly released open-source replacements for seven 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 apps, written in Rust with the help of Claude, drawing attention.⁠[6]

The next day, Shokunin Studio published “Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones,” testing AI-built image editors such as Photocraft, Photon Studio and Compositor and concluding that none had a brush engine matching Photoshop’s, that their performance dropped noticeably on canvases larger than 8K × 8K pixels, and that undo was constrained by memory budgets; the post also directly addressed a developer named “Brandon.”⁠[7]

The post further argued that feeding screenshots of Adobe’s apps into Claude to replicate its products violates the provision in Adobe’s terms of service prohibiting the recreation of its products, likening such clones to counterfeit goods.⁠[7]

On October 11, 2026, the blog published a short piece stating that a craftsman should live only for the craft.⁠[8]

On October 14, the blog published “It’s tokens all the way down,” likening promotion urging users to abandon established creative software for assorted AI clone apps to earlier cryptocurrency hype and saying the promoters serve large AI companies; the author also stated that open-source software remains important but argued that this trend does not reflect it.⁠[9]

According to its website, “Shokunin” is the pen name of digital creative, writer and software developer Aron Peterson, whose experience spans screenwriting, film production, on-set art direction, post-production, visual effects, web design, concept design, software beta testing, red teaming and app development; the website says the studio has no fixed location and is “wherever he goes.”⁠[10]

Its GitHub profile describes building creative apps for animators and filmmakers and working on a first novel, and lists its location as London.⁠[11]

The website’s contact page lists the Instagram account @shokunin.studio as a contact channel and states that any account posting in its name on X or BlueskyBlueskyBluesky is a decentralized social platform built on the AT Protocol; it grew out of an open-protocol project funded by Twitter in 2019 and is now developed and operated by the public benefit corporation Bluesky Social, PBC. It dropped invite-only access and opened to the public in February 2024, and by 2026 had more than 40 million users.Open the full entry is not the author.⁠[12]

Shokunin Studio: Official website: https://www.shokunin.studio/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

Instagram: Official account: https://www.instagram.com/shokunin.studio/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

GitHub: Official account: https://github.com/shokuninstudio (opens in a new window)⁠[11]