“Software is over,” developer Brandon Thomas declared after building free versions of seven Adobe apps with an AI model. He says he “one-shotted Photoshop,” meaning the AI produced it in a single attempt. Thomas, who runs ArtCraft, built the set with Claude Opus 5.5, an AI model that can write software from plain-language instructions. Building apps that way is known as vibe coding.
The seven cover Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. Adobe sells these by subscription, and its Creative Cloud Pro plan costs individuals $69.99 a month at the regular price. Thomas has said Adobe’s cancellation fees were the main reason he started. In his words, he was “bit by the dark pattern cancellation fee one too many times.” His versions cost nothing, run on Mac, Windows and Linux, and share their code openly for anyone to read and reuse.
PhotoCraft, the Photoshop version, opens, edits and saves real Photoshop files. Its project page says re-saving a document keeps the same appearance in 307 of 309 test files. The menus, shortcuts and tools sit where Photoshop users expect them.
Thomas also built the apps for AI to use. Every menu item and tool in PhotoCraft is a command, more than 500 in all. That lets an AI agent, software that carries out tasks for a person, run the app without anyone clicking. The page for LightCraft, the Lightroom version, describes an agent working through a photo shoot. It picks the shots to keep, edits them, selects the sky, exports the results and checks them.
By the project’s own labels, the claim that software is over runs ahead of the code. The project lists two of the seven apps as early alpha, a first test stage, and the other five as still in development. Early users have reported problems with basic editing, keyboard shortcuts and speed, and Thomas is relying on bug reports and outside contributors to fix them.
PhotoCraft’s own page says it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. At the top of its list of shortfalls are AI and generative features, the area where Adobe offers Firefly, its own creative AI, inside the same plan.
