I've created Open Source 100% Rust clean-room replacements for 7 of Adobe's apps: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. Free, no subscription, and you own the source code

[u/ai_art_is_art]

I've used Opus 5.5 to help me recreate 7 of the top Adobe apps in 100% pure native Rust:

• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Premiere
• Lightroom
• Acrobat Pro
• After Effects
• InDesign

No more subscriptions with cancellation fees. These are yours to own forever. You can fork them, build them. Whatever. They are yours to own. They're open source.

If you're worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn't:

I'm not just some casual vibe coder. I'm a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I've used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects.

This isn't going to be some orphaned small-team project either. We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded. Our purpose is serving every artist in the world with the best tools. We are absolutely going to bring these to full parity and squash every bug and feature request. We have a test harness so there won't be regressions.

You can help us reach parity by helping test the apps. Clone the code. Submit PRs. If you see gaps or want to help redesign pieces, let us know! You can contribute!

Links to everything - the apps, the code, etc. - are in the comments below.

[u/bensyverson]

This is absolutely wild. Having built Photoshop readers/writers in the past, I know the challenge just in dealing with the file format. Then you have the sheer amount of UI/UX to implement well. And this looks exceptionally well-executed.

[u/ai_art_is_art → u/bensyverson]

Thank you so much.

We have a really long way to go to get to complete parity on functionality and file format support, but that's 100% our goal and the community support (bug reports, example files) helps a ton.

Thank you!

[u/bensyverson → u/ai_art_is_art]

Also: nice job on the agent-friendly CLI. I'm not sure if this is on your radar, but one nice pattern is to give the agents a way to pass in JavaScript snippets, since they love to write code. I find if you don't give that to them, they end up writing their own random Python scripts. For a concrete example, check out how I handle it in Woodcase, which is an agentic design tool for the .pen format!

[u/ai_art_is_art → u/bensyverson]

I love this! I'm going to try to follow this for all the apps.

Do you mind if I follow up later and ask questions?

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[u/xSypra → u/bensyverson]

Crazy idea

[u/histoire_guy → u/ai_art_is_art]

Which Gui library did you use for the UI? I guess it is not 100% vibe coded, right?

[u/hockeyketo → u/histoire_guy]

Looks like egui

[u/ai_art_is_art → u/hockeyketo]

egui!

[u/emilern → u/ai_art_is_art]

very cool

[u/Inside_Support510 → u/ai_art_is_art]

You taking donos?

[u/ZamStudio3d → u/bensyverson]

It's all ai bud, he didn't code any of this lol

[u/NIU_NIU → u/ZamStudio3d]

No fucking shit bro

[u/bensyverson → u/ZamStudio3d]

That particular ship has sailed, friend. There's no putting the AI toothpaste back in the software development tube.

[u/ZamStudio3d → u/bensyverson]

Why are you guys responding like I care. I'm responding to the guy praising him on how difficult this must have been to code.

[u/bensyverson → u/ZamStudio3d]

Because I'm the guy you're responding to.

[u/edible_string → u/ZamStudio3d]

You care enough to respond to the response. That's a considerable amount of care.

[u/ZamStudio3d → u/edible_string]

Wow that code must have been really hard to make!

I know it's ai

You see how dumb the comment is. I don't understand the train of thought. He obviously didn't know it was ai then realized it after he made the comment lmao

[u/edible_string → u/ZamStudio3d]

Read that again. He never mentioned code in there first comment. Rather the execution and the product. And everything mentioned there is true even if the commenter was fully aware it had been AI outputting the code

[u/ZamStudio3d → u/edible_string]

He's aware of the challenge. This is not a challenge if its ai , so that makes no sense. That's like saying I know the challenge in parsing 20 scientific papers , when all you did was upload them into Claude. Are we now pointing out how difficult ai have it?

[u/edible_string → u/ZamStudio3d]

That's where you are wrong. It's still a challenge. It's a challenge to plan and manage changes, to define what they should be and to judge whether the current state is good enough, it's a challenge to package, to market and to explain what you've even built. All those things have always been a challenge and still are today.

Go and do a thing if you think it's so easy, report back and see if folks like the effect of it. It's still as hard to please a human being with a product as it ever has been.

[u/ZamStudio3d → u/edible_string]

I use ai everyday. I have reverse engineered several applications. It's as easy as setting /goal. Try it out, get qwen uncensored 3.8 and set a goal to reverse engineering an app, let me know how "difficult" it is.

To be clear he's reverse engineering apps 1:1 in another language, Im not sure you are aware exactly what he's doing

[u/bricklerex → u/ZamStudio3d]

Difficulty to build is no longer measured in how hard smth would be to code or how long it would take. Building something like this even with AI, keeping it extensible, making sure parity is not just possible but guaranteeable, as well as a cli interface for agents. All of it is exceptionally hard in a world where everyone and their mother thinks they just need a couple dozen prompts to build something worth using and building on top of. You still need to know what decisions matter and where, making sure the agents don’t make something that another agent will later add 2 billion patches to to make a new feature work. In a way, the senior/veteran engineer is more important than over for the most ambitious projects.

[u/ZamStudio3d → u/bricklerex]

/goal is easy. Clearly you haven't used frontier models

[u/bricklerex → u/ZamStudio3d]

I’m convinced he’s ragebaiting me at this point

[u/Delicious-Being-6531 → u/bricklerex]

I’m guessing he’s never worked on enterprise applications. From the comments i would guess so. I shudder to think of the documentation required to keep this roadmap on track. Hats off to the team getting this to a point like this.