PhotoCraft: What the AI-Built Photoshop Clone Can Really Do

A Photoshop clone written by AI agents, free and open source: PhotoCraft has only been on GitHub since late September, and it is already all over social feeds and video channels. More than 57,000 GitHub users have starred the repository, and the same team has added clones of Illustrator, Premiere, Word, Excel and AutoCAD. The real insight, however, is not in the hype but in the project’s own documents. They quantify, quite precisely, how far AI agents can get when rebuilding large software today, and what the rest will cost.

Key takeaways

• PhotoCraft is an open-source image editor written in Rust (MIT or Apache 2.0 license) that mirrors Photoshop’s menus, tools and keyboard shortcuts. The repository was created on September 30, 2026.
• The project comes from ArtCraft, led by developer Brandon Thomas, and is built mostly with agents running on Claude Opus 5.5. There are now more than a dozen such “Craft” apps.
• By the project’s own estimate, about 76 percent of Photoshop’s features exist in some form, but PhotoCraft is only about 45 percent ready for real professional work.
• The team expects another 1,100 to 1,800 agent-hours to reach beta and 2,300 to 4,100 to reach full parity.
• Legally, ArtCraft relies on a “clean-room” process without proprietary code. Nobody has verified that so far, and Adobe has not commented publicly.

What PhotoCraft can do today

Anyone who opens PhotoCraft will find their way around quickly, and that is exactly the pitch. Menus, panels and shortcuts sit where Photoshop users expect them. According to the project description, there are dozens of tools, layers with masks and smart objects, 16 adjustment layers such as Curves and Levels, layer styles, type and vector tools, and a brush engine that responds to pen pressure and tilt. The app runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD and can even run in the browser as a WebAssembly build. Rendering happens on the GPU through the Rust library wgpu, not inside a web wrapper like Electron.

The most important argument for switching is the PSD format. PhotoCraft opens and saves layered Photoshop files; according to its own tests, 307 of 309 files from the public test corpus of the psd-tools library look unchanged after being saved again. Developers will notice a second point: every function is registered as a command, more than 500 in total. The same commands are available through a command-line tool and an MCP server, the interface AI assistants use to operate software. That means batches of images can be processed by script, and an agent can drive PhotoCraft just like a human.

If you want to try it, signed installers are available on getartcraft.com and in the GitHub releases. The pace is fast: version 0.6.0 shipped on October 10, version 0.8.2 just two days later.

The most honest number is in the repository

On social media, the story goes that a single developer cloned Adobe’s software “in a week.” The project itself contradicts that with remarkable candor. In a parity document last revised on October 12, the team distinguishes between feature breadth and real-world readiness. Breadth stands at about 76 percent: all 631 cataloged Photoshop menu items trigger a command, and 59 of 68 tools exist. Asked whether a professional could replace Photoshop with it, however, the team answers with roughly 45 percent, and with about 61 percent for users who only need the core features.

How these numbers came about is revealing, too. On October 3, the team still estimated 82 percent and only 140 to 220 agent-hours to reach 95 percent. That estimate was “far too optimistic,” the document now says: about 1,230 bug reports have come in since the first release, most of them about features already counted as present. With test files created directly in Photoshop, the result matches Photoshop’s own rendering in only 133 of 256 cases, and users report that Photoshop sometimes rejects files saved by PhotoCraft. Generative features such as Adobe’s Generative Fill are missing, as is compatibility with Photoshop plug-ins.

The math behind this is the genuinely new finding. The team budgets two to four agent-hours per merged code change; the roughly 1,000 changes so far therefore represent 2,000 to 4,000 agent-hours. They took PhotoCraft from zero to about 45 percent readiness. For the second half, the project expects as much effort again or more. Because about 80 percent of the work can be parallelized, by the team’s estimate, calendar time shrinks, but compute does not. That matches what we recently described about the cost of agent teams: more agents speed things up, but they do not make the work cheaper.

Clean room or gray zone?

Legally, ArtCraft relies on the clean-room principle. Its contributor rules prohibit copying code, shaders, color profiles or graphics from Adobe software; Photoshop was studied only for “behavior and look,” and implementation comes from public specifications such as Adobe’s PSD documentation and the ICC color standard. One detail in the parity document, though, shows how close the work stays to the original: for measurement purposes, an installed copy of Photoshop 2026 was inspected without launching it, including configuration files, the default keyboard shortcut list and strings from the program binary. That has nothing to do with decompiling, meaning translating machine code back into source. But it shows that “observation only” is a stretchable term in practice.

Andres Guadamuz, a legal scholar at the University of Sussex, considers the project probably lawful in the United States, provided the clean room really was clean. Copyright protects program code as text, not its function. Courts have confirmed this several times, for instance in the dispute over the menu commands of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and in Google v. Oracle in 2021. In the EU, the Court of Justice ruled in the SAS Institute case in 2012 that functionality, programming languages and file formats are not protected by copyright. According to Guadamuz, the weak spots are license terms that prohibit taking software apart, as well as patents and trademarks. He expects more litigation over whether AI-assisted clean rooms are as clean as advertised.

The motivation behind the project is explicitly frustration with Adobe’s subscription model. Thomas writes that he stumbled over the cancellation fee too many times. There is official background to that: in March 2026, Adobe agreed to a $150 million package with the U.S. Department of Justice after authorities objected to hidden early termination fees and cumbersome cancellation processes. Adobe denies wrongdoing.

What the clone means and what it does not

The sharpest rebuttal comes from developer Christian Visintin. Companies, he argues, do not buy a feature list; they buy years of maintenance, support, security updates and an ecosystem of cloud libraries and collaboration. GIMP and LibreOffice have been mature for decades and still have not displaced Photoshop and Office in the professional market. The objection hits a sore spot: hundreds of open bug reports demand upkeep that costs money and attention, even with AI agents.

For readers, here is how to put it: today PhotoCraft is an impressive, fast and free editor for basic tasks such as cutouts, color correction and composites, ideal for experimenting and for Linux users without Photoshop. It is not yet reliable for client work or for exchanging PSD files with Photoshop users; anyone testing it should work on copies.

The bigger conclusion concerns the software industry. The first part of a clone, the visible interface and the core features, is something AI agents now deliver in weeks rather than years. Depth, file fidelity and trust remain expensive. Adobe’s moat is shifting from the tool palette toward Firefly, cloud services and decades of format reliability. PhotoCraft does not prove that Photoshop is replaceable. It proves that the distance to get there can now be measured in agent-hours, and the project publishes that number itself.