Vibe coding has taken a new turn, according to a report by Engadget. Earlier this month, a developer who was motivated by dislike of the subscription model of Adobe used Claude to reverse engineer Photoshop, Lightroom and other Creative Cloud apps. The team then used that information to create open source clones with similar functionality, which anyone can download and modify for free. The project is called Artcraft, and it was first launched in early October by software developer Brandon Thomas and his team, who described it on Reddit as a one to one replacement for the apps of Creative Cloud with a similar interface, with no subscription and with the source code owned by the user. The project has sparked intense debate, since some people feel that abusive subscription app makers are getting what they deserve, while others see it as simple piracy.
Thomas said on Hacker News that he decided to reverse engineer the apps after being caught by the cancellation fee of Adobe one time too many. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to create clean room versions of each app in pure Rust, which he claims are more performant than the originals. The photo editor of the team, Photocraft, does not have AI or other advanced features, but the reviewer found that it can do almost everything that is needed for resizing, masking and color adjustments. Its menus and controls are nearly one to one matches for Photoshop, so there is no steep learning curve, and it may be good enough for many Adobe subscribers, although it is not a substitute for power users.
There are still problems. Users have reported critical bugs in Photocraft, including images being deleted, layers being merged at random and a lack of stability, and the app cannot open native PSD files of Photoshop, which is a significant problem for existing users. The trend extends beyond one team, since an application called REA, which stands for Reverse Engineer Anything, has gone viral with 87,000 forks and 346,000 stars as of October 20. According to its GitHub description, it can inspect an app without its source code, explain how a feature works, show the evidence and build a version for a project. The approach can also be used on firmware for consumer devices such as televisions, refrigerators and musical instruments, and on games, with recent decompilations of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Metroid Prime. The website decomp.dev, which is dedicated to human reverse engineering of games, announced that it is shutting down because AI driven decompilation has overrun the community, as 404 Media reported.
Reactions have been mixed. One Reddit commenter who had built Photoshop readers and writers in the past said the project looks exceptionally well executed, while a critic on X said that the codebase will be unmaintainable within a few months, and another called Photocraft AI driven slop that infringed the trademarks and copyrights of Adobe. The legal side could be a barrier. The Artcraft team said that they never used a line of Adobe code, but they may have violated trademarks and patents, and the terms of use of Adobe explicitly ban reverse engineering of its software. Thomas said that AI lets people take back technology, and the report notes that a single person skilled with AI can now do what used to take a team of engineers, which could produce many poor quality apps but could also force companies like Adobe to rethink business models that many people dislike.
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