Tedium's Ernie Smith looks at ArtCraft, a project rebuilding Adobe's Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop with clean-room, AI-first vibe-coding techniques, asks whether it is ethical, and argues it shows what happens when a company like Adobe ignores its users.

Let’s Deconstruct Photoshop

A quixotic new project takes an AI-first approach to battling Adobe, and while it’s unclear where it leads, it raises important questions about what happens when companies ignore their users.

I am not a unique flower. Like many creatives, I had a good relationship with Adobe that, over time, went belly up.

The first sign something was wrong was when the company more or less ignored Mac design conventions in a way that made its software harder to use. (All you had to do was support full-screen apps in Mac OS X Lion, dudes!)

Then it turned its subscription plan into the only real option. Then it kept raising prices. Then it changed its offering in a way that suggested it only really cared about customers who could pay them for hundreds of licenses each year.

On top of that, it failed to keep up with where I was going as a user, along with many other users. Despite the fact that a huge contingent of power users have been decamping to Linux, it more or less ignored those users. Meanwhile, AI changed the definition of what software could be.

That perhaps explains why I’m not particularly surprised that some programmer decided to rebuild the Creative Cloud suite using clean-room techniques in a vibe-coded environment. It solves many of the issues that upset power users—the lack of end-user responsiveness, the high cost, and the ability to use it on the platform of their choice. Adobe, as a public company, has often been tethered to the desires of the stock market, which has meant a lot of AI stuff, even when many creatives have made clear they do not want them.

So now, we have ArtCraft out here Robin Hooding every single one of the key Adobe apps.

The names aren’t the ones you’re familiar with, but you nonetheless know what each one is. One is a Photoshop stand-in. Another is Premiere Pro. Another is Acrobat. And yes, there’s even an InDesign riff.

Do they work particularly well? On the surface, yes. Opening up these apps in AppImage shows that these apps, programmed in the Rust programming language, are not only fast, but relatively small. Rather than hundreds of megabytes, these apps load in tens of megabytes. They detected my discrete GPU right away. And within a couple of minutes, I was manipulating an image.

A lot of finicky, below the surface stuff did not work so well. Color pickers and secondary menu boxes were rough, not elegant. It did not detect my fonts in DesignCraft until I downloaded an update published just a few minutes before I downloaded it. And while I could set a color with a hex code in PhotoCraft, I could not do the same in DesignCraft.

But it was familiar. I could see myself building a zine with this tool, or using it to access old files that I cannot otherwise open without a Creative Cloud subscription.

Is an open-source vibe-coded creative suite really worth cheering on? I think so.

There are real reasons to cheer on something like this, even if you otherwise hate AI. The spirit of this evokes a Robin Hood-like mindset, in that it exists because of real ethical and economic issues around Adobe that many end users have long been stuck with. In one sense, it is “fighting AI slop with AI slop.” And even if you don’t end up using these tools, the techniques that these projects land on will ultimately inspire open-source projects that actually rely on craft. There are other apps that have emerged in the past couple of years that hope to bring design to Linux; this open-source tool may have opened up a shortcut for these projects.

Let’s talk about “craft” a second here: I think it’s a bad name to build around for this project, as cool and interesting as it is. Craft implies that a lot of heart was put into the code, that it was built by an expert. Which may be true of the artists and creatives that actually use this thing, but does it really speak to what the vibe coders are actually doing? Probably not. It’s really easy to not give critics something to point to, so don’t give it to them.

Another thing that they’re likely to point to is the inherent security issues that might come with a tool like this. The decision to use Rust as the language is likely to help with stability, but it’s not like any regular user is going to be looking at the code here.

But AI coding techniques are likely to change our relationship with open source for good, as seen with the recent AI-based fork of Asahi Linux. And in fact, it may change how companies like Adobe think of open source and vibe coding.

Who knows how legal this is? This feels like one a legit lawyer should probably weigh in on. But some of the language creator Brandon Thomas has used on forums and the ArtCraft website evokes the spirit of Napster, an icon of tech rebelliousness that is not exactly very rebellious in 2026. Napster was not legal, but it still changed everything. That’s a better place for AI in the cultural conversation than “everyone making the worst signs you’ve ever seen.”

And even if ArtCraft’s wild deconstruction project fails, it feels clear others will try to take its place. Which is exactly what happened with Napster.

Crafty Links

So the Ellisons own Warner Bros. Discovery, which I don’t love. But you know what I do love? That the anti-animation monster named David Zaslav isn’t in charge anymore.

The fact that a political candidate turned a famous I Think You Should Leave sketch into a very effective political ad is the kind of world I want to live in.

I’m getting sent a lot of single-serving sites at the moment. Here’s one that’s an iPod-themed music game that you might enjoy.

Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! PhotoCraft, by the way, doesn’t support animated GIFs just yet, but it does have the Save for Web legacy menu, which I was able to use to make today’s header. Not a bad start.