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Fed up with Adobe fees, he rebuilt Photoshop and six other Adobe apps for free

Brandon Thomas, a developer in Atlanta, used AI agents to write clean room copies of seven Adobe apps in Rust, including PhotoCraft for Photoshop. He put them on GitHub free on September 30 and October 1, 2026. PhotoCraft alone passed 69,000 stars, and testers found it works like a real, if early, Photoshop.

How it works

  1. Thomas directed AI agents, about 8 running at once
  2. Agents wrote the apps in Rust from watching how the Adobe apps behave
  3. About 1,700 tests checked the copies against the real apps
  4. Seven apps published free on GitHub on September 30 and October 1

Why it’s worth knowing

One person and a set of agents copied seven paid pro apps well enough that tens of thousands of people saved them in two weeks.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on github.com. See the original ↗

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.