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
> I needed to seed a community that could help contribute bug reports and PRs.
Holy shit dude you cannot possibly just say out loud that you're using people.
I know that AI makes you feel like god, but this is the style of communication that will be quoted against you. If you truly want to play this game (which I _highly_ recommend you shouldn't) then you must absolutely step that up.
There are some incredibly smart people on HN, but I wasn't quite ready for this project to face the firing squad. It's still much too new for the world's harshest critics.
With lots of additional effort, I expect this to succeed much like bun. Fingers crossed.
Obviously you don't need to pay for Photoshop anymore. Does that mean your product is the replacement? No. Just an example.
The fact that you or anyone can get to 95-99% very quickly. The rest can be added over time at a very high pace and some "actual effort".
Unless Photoshop can add some sort of proprietary features then why use them? (they have been doing this with AI features mostly, but it should still all be copyable)
the "photoshop equivalent" is really broken at a fundamental level. I can't do ANYTHING I tried to do. I'm sure it sort of works but the basics aren't there. Have you tried using it yourself?
Indeed — what I am reading of this strongly suggests a misunderstanding about exactly what it is that makes Photoshop what it is.
I think it might be possible to slop-code an Excel clone because — truly minor interactivity quibbles aside — it can be tested with a truly exhaustive suite. The clone can be proved to do what it is supposed to do, over whatever subset one would choose to implement.
But Photoshop is not an application in the same way that Excel is an application.
(Not least because while powerful, Excel, like Word, is an implementation of an existing idea. Photoshop is the OG; it has all the history of the OG)
Photoshop is also a surface and a medium. It has a feel, it has responsiveness. It's like oil painting or watercolour: its own thing, with its own pen/brush dynamics, its own interactivity.
Part of the reason people don't want to switch away to Affinity (even though Affinity is free as in beer, highly capable and in some ways better) is just that to a set of very hardcore users, it does not have this feel. They just don't like how it feels.
Automated testing that focusses on pixel-precise rendering misses the point. It may actually matter less that it renders PSDs pixel-accurately than that it actually feels right.
If you are not convinced by my argument, look at "dodge and burn retouching". For better or worse, high end fashion photo retouching is done in an extremely precise, wildly technical, tiny subset of Photoshop tools.
If you want to replace Photoshop it has to be responsive at that level. And since that level is partly subjective experience, it's going to take some people.
oh c'mon, this thing IS garbage but it's completely possible to build a good one with AI, it just takes craftsmanship which is the part the dude spent no time on.
Not with the kind of vibe coded automatic testing they are talking about, though.
You really need to sit down with a Photoshop user to see how they feel about it and how they approach alternatives; it took me no time to adapt from Photoshop + Wacom tablet to Affinity Photo + Wacom tablet, but I know photographers who won't because it's "not right".
Serif had more luck converting Illustrator users to Affinity Designer, and made the right decision to release Designer first, because Illustrator users were much more frustrated with Adobe, and because giving those users what they wanted helped get past the way the app does not "feel" exactly the same.
There is no way that a "pixel-accurate compliance" test suite can capture what it is that makes these applications the way they are.
did you test it? the photo application opened a photo, pinch to zoom worked, the menus are full of buttons. it seems like the features i tested worked. they are mostly in similar spots as photoshop/photopea.
its a little impressive that models have a compressed approximation of photoshop inside that works with minimal tinkering.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
three days ago he said he one-shotted the entirety of photoshop. he's been promoting this all over reddit. seems odd to then say it's "very early stage"
Yeah, I got totally numb to AI slop. I looked at it and thought, this is surely so broken that nothing works. Came for the comments and the folks who actually had the time to invest in trying it out confirm that nothing works.
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.
The projects proposed couldn't be further away from the FOSS bubble with its ideas, values and spirit.
It is - effectively - exactly the same in spirit as Adobe. It's just business people fighting each other.
Which is nice don't get me wrong, but it's a different kind of nice.
Phrased differently and more inflammatory, the F in Foss does not mean fraud and hopefully never will. This however is just that. Defrauding someone out of their unjustified monopoly through GPU compute instead of merit.
Look at it. It is an identical recreation created in bad faith with zero additional creativity put into it.
It is "I want this, but I don't like that it is yours. I will take it. Claude, clone these apps in rust. Make no mistakes."
___
Just because Adobe sucks doesn't mean that someone capable of doing that and doing it this blatantly would be trustworthy and "on our side".
In fact, given all what I've seen, I'd predict that this guy in particular will just rugpull people even harder than adobe could ever do, given that they have the inertia and friction of being a large corp softening and slowing down the blows they could deal.
As said, it's still fine because Adobe is a terrible corp, but don't be mistaken. And do not taint foss with this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, anyone can list ten features Photoshop has that GIMP, for example, lacks. But it's just as easy to list ten features GIMP has that Photoshop lacks. They're not trying to be the same program.
I see the same argument all the time about Windows vs Linux. Linux lacks this, Linux lacks that, etc... but somehow, people fail to notice that Windows lacks a whole lot of important things that Linux has. Because a Windows user won't be aware of what they're missing. But for me, coming from a Linux background, Windows is missing so much I would view it as unusable.
Changing from one to the other is painful, because of the differences. It's not a drop-in replacement you can keep using exactly the same way. But that doesn't make either one better or worse. They're different, and that's a good thing. But different requires learning, and learning is hard.
Anyway, you're correct that $FreeProgram isn't a drop-in replacement for $ProprietaryProgram. But that's not a valid argument on the relative value of the two programs.
The interesting parts are what is lacking though, not just any feature. A life without smart objects is terrible in photo editing as an example, at least once you’ve seen the upsides.
That and Camera Raw actually being an incredibly capable raw conversion engine.
But I’m not trying to convince anyone here, just saying it makes sense people are paying for Adobe software.
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.
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.
I'll lend some support to the complaints - V3 is just so much slower than V2, nevermind V1, and it's using a lot more system resources now. It seems that lumping everything into one app has bloated it out in just the same way that Adobe's stuff got bloated, and it's sad to see Affinity drift in that direction as well.
I have all 3 versions installed, but most of the time I reach for Affinity Photo V1 just because it will launch faster. If I need Designer, I reach for Affinity Designer V2.
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 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)
Given the vibes i have very little hope, but i have to have some hope, because at this point I've been waiting my whole life for an open source InDesign competitor (no, scribus is not competitive)
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.
... brought to you by storyteller.ai, which now has a defunct hero video, but apparently still 10 mio users (at $12+ monthly). I very much applaud them for pouring their (est.) $1.4B ARR into Open Source.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just because you like these apps doesn't mean I'm happy with them and have to settle. Nor does it imply everyone in the market is happy with these tools. I'm sure lots of people share my opinion.
I've used nearly every open source creative tool that open source has to offer, and I've been deeply unsatisfied by what's available.
I've repeatedly tried to get into Krita over the years and it's just not my cup of tea. It's fine if it works for you, but I'm not happy with it.
I don't like Kdenlive either. Or much of anything from or built with KDE or Gnome.
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'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 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!
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 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 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.
> 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.
It is exactly the same for books as it is for code: as per the Anthropic case, training is fair use. But that case says nothing about the generated outputs. All the Anthropic case did was say, "the legal system refuses to ban AI outright because copyright is not a union and artists are not entitled to collective protection". Individual outputs can still be infringing.
At inference time, there's a whole new legal question: are the specific outputs of the model substantially similar to anything that the LLM had access to? Even if AI training itself was infringement, a specific generated output of that model could be noninfringing anyway. And vice versa, AI training being fair use doesn't form a blanket defense against a specific AI copyright infringement. If you ask the model to create an art program, it could still generate something substantially similar to the code of an existing art program.
In the case of regurgitation[0], the fact that an LLM was involved is immaterial. The only thing the law cares about is if a copy was made somewhere along the chain and if the alleged copy was substantially similar to the purported original. The only thing LLMs do for this analysis is make access to the original far easier to allege, because LLMs are trained on everything.
[0] Inclusive of both model weights and context regurgitation
Tested it: very broken software produced by AI. The title and description is so far away from the truth you may well call it deceptive.
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
I haven't had a chance to use it, how are you lost?
Really? The creator said this three days ago
> 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?
surprised Pikachu face
I wasn't ready for this to be posted on HN, but this is moving so fast.
99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years.
Feel free to check in on this claim. It's measurable.
you posted this on multiple subreddits and claimed "We're going to reach 100% parity within a month."
and now it's not ready for HN? what happened in the last 24 hours for that to be the case?
i look forward to a beta release of all 7 softwares with 99% feature parity november 5th.
Reddit isn't HN.
I needed to seed a community that could help contribute bug reports and PRs.
I had no intention of posting a thread here until it was more mature, because I knew this would be the response.
For what it's worth, kudos. This is very good use of ai, and bun proves that it is weeks to months till this hits stability.
The haters aren't seeing the direction, and proven examples.
In what way does Bun prove this?
Bun was a conversion of the source code to a different language.
what proven examples? lmao
> I needed to seed a community that could help contribute bug reports and PRs.
Holy shit dude you cannot possibly just say out loud that you're using people.
I know that AI makes you feel like god, but this is the style of communication that will be quoted against you. If you truly want to play this game (which I _highly_ recommend you shouldn't) then you must absolutely step that up.
why? Microsoft used Vista to test Windows 7.
seems completely normal to release free beta software and ask for feedback.
Disregard the haters. They were here yelling about how bun rewrite would never work and yet it's done in a couple of weeks.
Thank you.
There are some incredibly smart people on HN, but I wasn't quite ready for this project to face the firing squad. It's still much too new for the world's harshest critics.
With lots of additional effort, I expect this to succeed much like bun. Fingers crossed.
I sympathize.
Obviously you don't need to pay for Photoshop anymore. Does that mean your product is the replacement? No. Just an example.
The fact that you or anyone can get to 95-99% very quickly. The rest can be added over time at a very high pace and some "actual effort".
Unless Photoshop can add some sort of proprietary features then why use them? (they have been doing this with AI features mostly, but it should still all be copyable)
> The fact that you or anyone can get to 95-99% very quickly.
fact? what fact? have people lost their fucking minds here?
This is not even 1% of Photoshop yet. They won't get to 95% in a lifetime or 10.
the "photoshop equivalent" is really broken at a fundamental level. I can't do ANYTHING I tried to do. I'm sure it sort of works but the basics aren't there. Have you tried using it yourself?
The Bun rewrite is qualitatively different, is it not? It's a source to source conversion.
Yes, it is, but it was deemed impossible as well.
The more interesting part is that people "release" this "products" and market it even if were like version 1.
Indeed — what I am reading of this strongly suggests a misunderstanding about exactly what it is that makes Photoshop what it is.
I think it might be possible to slop-code an Excel clone because — truly minor interactivity quibbles aside — it can be tested with a truly exhaustive suite. The clone can be proved to do what it is supposed to do, over whatever subset one would choose to implement.
But Photoshop is not an application in the same way that Excel is an application.
(Not least because while powerful, Excel, like Word, is an implementation of an existing idea. Photoshop is the OG; it has all the history of the OG)
Photoshop is also a surface and a medium. It has a feel, it has responsiveness. It's like oil painting or watercolour: its own thing, with its own pen/brush dynamics, its own interactivity.
Part of the reason people don't want to switch away to Affinity (even though Affinity is free as in beer, highly capable and in some ways better) is just that to a set of very hardcore users, it does not have this feel. They just don't like how it feels.
Automated testing that focusses on pixel-precise rendering misses the point. It may actually matter less that it renders PSDs pixel-accurately than that it actually feels right.
If you are not convinced by my argument, look at "dodge and burn retouching". For better or worse, high end fashion photo retouching is done in an extremely precise, wildly technical, tiny subset of Photoshop tools.
If you want to replace Photoshop it has to be responsive at that level. And since that level is partly subjective experience, it's going to take some people.
oh c'mon, this thing IS garbage but it's completely possible to build a good one with AI, it just takes craftsmanship which is the part the dude spent no time on.
Not with the kind of vibe coded automatic testing they are talking about, though.
You really need to sit down with a Photoshop user to see how they feel about it and how they approach alternatives; it took me no time to adapt from Photoshop + Wacom tablet to Affinity Photo + Wacom tablet, but I know photographers who won't because it's "not right".
Serif had more luck converting Illustrator users to Affinity Designer, and made the right decision to release Designer first, because Illustrator users were much more frustrated with Adobe, and because giving those users what they wanted helped get past the way the app does not "feel" exactly the same.
There is no way that a "pixel-accurate compliance" test suite can capture what it is that makes these applications the way they are.
did you test it? the photo application opened a photo, pinch to zoom worked, the menus are full of buttons. it seems like the features i tested worked. they are mostly in similar spots as photoshop/photopea.
its a little impressive that models have a compressed approximation of photoshop inside that works with minimal tinkering.
the icon for windows doesnt work.
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.
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.
"Built the hard way.
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.
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.
Have you tried the apps, or have any experience with Photoshop (complex photo or art or video projects)?
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?
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?
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.
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.
Which clone? Photon? It's not open source, why are creative apps often not open source, unlike other kinds of apps?
Open source is strong in developer tools and where it is complimentary to some other product.
Creative apps don’t fit in either of those categories.
Everyone knows there's a big group of people willing to pay through the nose for good ones so nobody wants to give them away?
Not many people like to work for free
In the AI era nobody has time to use software, they just ask AI to evaluate the app that AI built…
A house of mirrors.
The author has said this is very early stage and from what I can see this has only existed for a week
three days ago he said he one-shotted the entirety of photoshop. he's been promoting this all over reddit. seems odd to then say it's "very early stage"
> I think we’re already very numb to AI.
Yeah, I got totally numb to AI slop. I looked at it and thought, this is surely so broken that nothing works. Came for the comments and the folks who actually had the time to invest in trying it out confirm that nothing works.
I don't think a broken clone of Photoshop would leave me dumbfounded, there's lots of them out there
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.
No IP for Adobe to retaliate on. None of the UI is patentable.
Can't believe HN sentiment is taking adobe's side over open source, just because the latter used AI.
The projects proposed couldn't be further away from the FOSS bubble with its ideas, values and spirit.
It is - effectively - exactly the same in spirit as Adobe. It's just business people fighting each other.
Which is nice don't get me wrong, but it's a different kind of nice.
Phrased differently and more inflammatory, the F in Foss does not mean fraud and hopefully never will. This however is just that. Defrauding someone out of their unjustified monopoly through GPU compute instead of merit.
Look at it. It is an identical recreation created in bad faith with zero additional creativity put into it.
It is "I want this, but I don't like that it is yours. I will take it. Claude, clone these apps in rust. Make no mistakes."
___
Just because Adobe sucks doesn't mean that someone capable of doing that and doing it this blatantly would be trustworthy and "on our side".
In fact, given all what I've seen, I'd predict that this guy in particular will just rugpull people even harder than adobe could ever do, given that they have the inertia and friction of being a large corp softening and slowing down the blows they could deal.
As said, it's still fine because Adobe is a terrible corp, but don't be mistaken. And do not taint foss with this.
Who took Adobe's side? Pointing out their behavior isn't an endorsement
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
I am sure adobe has known about this, so they pivoted to web aka cloud Saas for businesses a few years ago
Adobe’s problem isn’t that we replace their tools with AI created tools. It’s that we replace the use of their tools with the use of AI.
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.
> someone frustrated with their pricing
What about their service?
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.
Despicable.
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.
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.
I'm curious if there are design parents or anything that could put these kinds of projects in legal peril
Nope. UI Design is so well worn and incremental that everything will be disputable, and hence almost never are patents applied for.
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.
Just curious, what is the subscription for? Purely for image generations? Are these built into the apps, or just a web feature?
That's a web feature / separate open source app. It's open source HiggsField (app, backend infra).
The Adobe apps are 100% open source, desktop, MIT, no telemetry.
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft etc.
I’m skeptical.
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.
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).
You may also want to look at https://redlamp.app - in pre-alpha but looking very promising!
(Disclosure: I'm the developer)
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.
Sure, anyone can list ten features Photoshop has that GIMP, for example, lacks. But it's just as easy to list ten features GIMP has that Photoshop lacks. They're not trying to be the same program.
I see the same argument all the time about Windows vs Linux. Linux lacks this, Linux lacks that, etc... but somehow, people fail to notice that Windows lacks a whole lot of important things that Linux has. Because a Windows user won't be aware of what they're missing. But for me, coming from a Linux background, Windows is missing so much I would view it as unusable.
Changing from one to the other is painful, because of the differences. It's not a drop-in replacement you can keep using exactly the same way. But that doesn't make either one better or worse. They're different, and that's a good thing. But different requires learning, and learning is hard.
Anyway, you're correct that $FreeProgram isn't a drop-in replacement for $ProprietaryProgram. But that's not a valid argument on the relative value of the two programs.
The interesting parts are what is lacking though, not just any feature. A life without smart objects is terrible in photo editing as an example, at least once you’ve seen the upsides. That and Camera Raw actually being an incredibly capable raw conversion engine.
But I’m not trying to convince anyone here, just saying it makes sense people are paying for Adobe software.
Two main things:
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 never hear these complaints from creative professionals, only developers.
I'll just keep using Affinity.
…which was bought by Canva and has already been enshittified.
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.
It was enshittified the moment it became a single app.
Serious publishers don't want a photo editing program in their UI.
> 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...
I'll lend some support to the complaints - V3 is just so much slower than V2, nevermind V1, and it's using a lot more system resources now. It seems that lumping everything into one app has bloated it out in just the same way that Adobe's stuff got bloated, and it's sad to see Affinity drift in that direction as well.
I have all 3 versions installed, but most of the time I reach for Affinity Photo V1 just because it will launch faster. If I need Designer, I reach for Affinity Designer V2.
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.
> which was bought by Canva and has already been enshittified
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/
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)
Still no linux support.
Affinity works fine on Linux using this: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer
Yes, even hardware acceleration works.
Given the vibes i have very little hope, but i have to have some hope, because at this point I've been waiting my whole life for an open source InDesign competitor (no, scribus is not competitive)
i don't want to have to sign up / log in just to test drive the desktop app?
you don't have to?
https://github.com/storytold
> i don't want to have to sign up / log in just to test drive the desktop app?
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
OMG, the page design is incredible
sarcasm?
Not sure, but at least it isn't beige.
i like this project, the scope is enough to test most of the claims being made about vibe coding
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.
yep. people make all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about the capabilities of agentic coding, this is a great test of those claims.
Whether it gets finished or not will say more about the developer than AI.
... brought to you by storyteller.ai, which now has a defunct hero video, but apparently still 10 mio users (at $12+ monthly). I very much applaud them for pouring their (est.) $1.4B ARR into Open Source.
As soon as I saw this software suite about 2 days ago, I shorted Adobe Inc immediately.
Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.
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.
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.
PDF is an ISO standard. People are buying Acrobat to open, edit, and publish ISO-standard PDF files, NOT just "the shit Acrobat publishes".
Now that being said, Adobe has plenty of non-standardized file formats that they absolutely could do AutoCAD-style shenanigans with.
> 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.
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.
"$120 price target" is a prediction about the price in some near-ish term time range.
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.
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.
are you kidding? its all vibe coding
> are you kidding? its all vibe coding
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.
no, they're vibcoding. they aren't looking at the code or even testing the output themselves.
They are clearly all vibe-coded
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?
Only have to pay the price once.
I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.
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.
>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.
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.
In fact... this guy just made me coin a new term. Thanks.
"Shitting on the shoulder of giants"
that is a good one re llms
Those dated workflows are what people seem to want, they say any creative app that doesn't behave like adobe is not worth considering
Maybe.
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.
Affinity is not open source so there's that. There should be an OSS Photoshop drop in alternative like affinity tries to be
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 need to give at least some 10 years of your life to achieve this. GIMP, Krita and inkscape are amazing projects.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
Yeah, fuck those dorks whose shoulders your LLM stands on. Pull the ladder up!
I will not stand for the Krita slander >:( ! Gimp and Inkscape I haven't used much, but they also had pretty neat updates lately.
Just because you like these apps doesn't mean I'm happy with them and have to settle. Nor does it imply everyone in the market is happy with these tools. I'm sure lots of people share my opinion.
I've used nearly every open source creative tool that open source has to offer, and I've been deeply unsatisfied by what's available.
I've repeatedly tried to get into Krita over the years and it's just not my cup of tea. It's fine if it works for you, but I'm not happy with it.
I don't like Kdenlive either. Or much of anything from or built with KDE or Gnome.
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.
Amazing work!
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!
It’s not what you’re after but onshape is pretty respectable, and the free offering is decent.
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.
These days I just use rhino/grasshopper via Claude code and MCP, and half the time it just writes python scripts that run in the GH context.
There’s plenty of work that’s not appropriate for, but works for me.
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.
I look forward to the beta and beyond!
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!
> AutoCAD, and Solidworks too
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.
This is fantastic! Thank you for building these and pointing me in this direction.
I'll be pinging you about this in the future
Do these expose a scripting API? ExtendScript is basically ecmascript3 used in Adobe apps, would be cool to have modern js available
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.
LibreOffice could see some UI and compatibility work, the compatibility work is mostly done
> Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again
we remember different 1999s. i remember everyone pirating software made by large companies at that moment in time
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.
Remember the ebay stalking scandal?
Remember the Boeing whistleblower?
> you are trying to make money off those recreations
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.
https://getartcraft.com/pricing exists
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.
Dont aim for solidworks, aim for AutoCad & Inventor - The AutoDesk Suite.
it's ready enough for reddit though? or is u/ai_art_is_art not you?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1wwnhbt/ive_created_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1wxmunv/ive_created...
https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wwo52q/ive_creat...
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1wvz0lj/100_open_so...
https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1wvz4ua/100_ope...
> We have estimates for feature parity checked into the roadmap files of each app. We should be in "Beta" stage / ~100% parity within a month.
> We're going to reach 100% parity within a month.
Can't wait to check back in a month!
Honestly the scrollbar is infuriating. Can't expect any better attention to UX from the apps.
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.
> 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.
Huh? If ai can ingest books and that is judged as fair use, why is it not the same for code?
It is exactly the same for books as it is for code: as per the Anthropic case, training is fair use. But that case says nothing about the generated outputs. All the Anthropic case did was say, "the legal system refuses to ban AI outright because copyright is not a union and artists are not entitled to collective protection". Individual outputs can still be infringing.
At inference time, there's a whole new legal question: are the specific outputs of the model substantially similar to anything that the LLM had access to? Even if AI training itself was infringement, a specific generated output of that model could be noninfringing anyway. And vice versa, AI training being fair use doesn't form a blanket defense against a specific AI copyright infringement. If you ask the model to create an art program, it could still generate something substantially similar to the code of an existing art program.
In the case of regurgitation[0], the fact that an LLM was involved is immaterial. The only thing the law cares about is if a copy was made somewhere along the chain and if the alleged copy was substantially similar to the purported original. The only thing LLMs do for this analysis is make access to the original far easier to allege, because LLMs are trained on everything.
[0] Inclusive of both model weights and context regurgitation