A developer's free Adobe clones, built with AI

Headlines declaring that software is over (the usual clickbait). The developer Brandon Thomas made project ArtCraft, and it is seven free Rust apps modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and the rest of Adobe's lineup. Reportedly he was charged one cancellation fee too many (didn't we all).

If an AI can reproduce an interface in weeks, the interface was never the moat. Users prefer software that works like what they already know, so cloning Adobe's layout is a sound strategy. But the pitch is compatibility, and I see no sign of anyone asking what a photo editor should look like if you started today with an agent driving it. The one part that isn't a copy, by the project's own description, is that every app can be driven from a CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server. That is the bit I'd watch. Agents working through MCP is exactly what impressed me in Figma.

What keeps people on Adobe is boring: file formats, plugins, other people's files. Nobody leaves that behind because the menus are free elsewhere. Is it a real threat to Adobe? An alpha with a slogan doesn't settle that either way. The most effective Adobe competitor may still be Adobe's own cancellation flow.

Related, I found REA on github with title "Reverse Engineer Anything". It hands your coding agent tools to inspect a program and explain what it does then recreate it. Amazing, Software is over.