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Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warnings (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 4 days ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76827125

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[-] Aedis@lemmy.world 60 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Y'all are missing the bigger picture here. This brings up the question of ai and intellectual property and throws the ball into adobe's court to set their army of lawyers on figuiring out a no-win solution for themselves.

  • If they do nothing, a working clone normalizes copying their product's behavior and UI. Copyright covers that thinly anyway (the First Circuit in Lotus v. Borland treated a command menu hierarchy as an unprotectable method of operation). Trademarks need policing!! (And they suck)
  • If they go after it, they have to argue in court that AI output built from public material is infringing or derivative. That's the precedent the AI industry wants to avoid, and it cuts against Adobe's own Firefly pitch. Imagine what that means for "art" made with an LLM
  • If the clone's code is mostly AI-written, its copyrightability is shaky (Copyright Office, Thaler). But that cuts both ways: Adobe can't claim "you stole our code" without proving actual copied code. Which bites into OpenAI, Anthropic, Google's claims that they haven't stolen anything.

Edit: Sorry I should've used Super Intelligence, I don't want to be the enemy. /s

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 days ago

I really don't think any of this is intentional, though. It's just the contradictions being heightened.

[-] WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

it was guaranteed to happen. didn’t need to be masterminded, but the target points to forethought.

[-] agentTeiko@piefed.social 7 points 3 days ago

Yeah this would be great if it went that way but really the other option more likely to happen is they settle and the guy goes away quietly and nothing comes of it as their SLAP lawsuit works like a charm.

[-] Aedis@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Settle what? What's the outcome of the settlement. Even that sets a precedent.

[-] agentTeiko@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago

The Kind of we will drop our suit if you give us your code etc.

[-] Miller@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago

Thank you for the reimplementations of Adobe and Office, have not laughed this much in a long time.

[-] Sauvandu60@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 days ago

Adobe VS AI slop, who would win ?

[-] boletus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 hours ago

Adobe is all in on AI investment either way they win.

[-] pipe01@programming.dev 5 points 3 days ago

Can I bet on neither of them?

[-] axh@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

The fact that everyone despises Adobe lately (last few years?) for their extremely anti consumer practices makes this case so much more difficult to judge.

On one hand, it is a blatant steal of an intellectual property. Not the code, but the UI, the philosophy behind the programs, with zero creativity added. On the other hand, fuck Adobe.

[-] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 days ago

What safety warnings?

[-] deadbeef79000 17 points 4 days ago

It's vibe coded, who knows what else it's doing?

The same applies to the genuine article too though.

[-] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 days ago

The same applies to the genuine article too though.

And that's the problem. At least if the vibe-coded thing is open-source you can look at the code (or in all likelihood just have another LLM skimp over the code it to check for intentional malware if it's too much slop but that's still much better than nothing)

[-] Miller@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

'That transmission, Mother's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an SOS, it looks like a warning'.

[-] deadbeef79000 1 points 4 days ago

Oh, totes agree!

[-] ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 days ago

Piracy claims, that's funny

[-] SomethingWentWrong@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago

It's still an early work in progress but it has very high velocity with PRs and issue activity:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/pulse

Something to keep an eye on and see how they progress against their roadmap:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/ROADMAP.md

[-] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

does it actually work though? Anyone tried it?

[-] warmaster@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I have the whole suite of apps installed as a Flatpak. The Photoshop clone is the fastest one to implement features, but the whole suite is moving really fast. Looking at the commits and features shipped, I haven't seen anything like this. It looks very well organized.

I have been using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign professionally for ~30 years. These Craft apps are freaking amazing, they open in the blink of an eye and open multi-gb files just as fast. Working with these big files is also instantaneous.

I have done my own calculations, and what they say is true, the Suite will reach beta status by mid-late October depending on the app. But the suite in general will be ready with more features than what a basic-intermediate user would want.

I think what will make or break the Suite is if they go with local AI or not for Neural filters and generative fill. The community might turn on them if they don't.

But technically speaking It's truly an amazing feat.

These are my own projections, so it's not official:

Repo Ready today Hours to beta Beta (central) Range
vectorcraft 62% 170–270 Oct 13 Oct 12–15
lightcraft 61% 340–600 Oct 15 Oct 13–19
photocraft 45% 1,100–1,800 Oct 22 Oct 17–31
effectcraft 45% 350–620 Oct 22 Oct 17 – Nov 1
filmcraft 56% 400–700 Oct 22 Oct 17 – Nov 1
printcraft 49% 400–700 Oct 22 Oct 16–31
designcraft 47% 435–775 Nov 26 Nov 3 – Jan 4
[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 3 points 3 days ago

My money's on Microsoft taking down the repo before that.

[-] SkavarSharraddas@gehirneimer.de 9 points 3 days ago

Does it matter? If it works we can laugh at Adobe, if it doesn't we can laugh at "AI", and however it goes we can probably laugh at Adobe vs "AI".

this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
50 points (78.4% liked)

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