Developer Behind the AI-Built Adobe Clones Says They Are “Not Anywhere Close to Ready
Brandon Thomas, the developer behind open-source replacements for seven Adobe applications, recently shared an update on Hacker News, stating that the project is “not anywhere close to ready.” This admission contrasts sharply with earlier promotional posts on Reddit, which projected nearly 100% functionality within a month.
Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 to develop these applications in Rust, with WebAssembly builds for browser compatibility, mirroring Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. The project is licensed under MIT and Apache licenses.
According to the project’s roadmap, updated on October 11, the feature completeness is estimated at about 76%, with readiness for real work pegged at 45%. The roadmap indicates that achieving beta status will require an additional 1,100 to 1,800 hours, while full parity is projected to take between 2,300 and 4,100 hours, based on the work of a single agent using Opus 5.5.
The roadmap details that the target for full functionality is Photoshop 2026, version 27.11.0, as measured from the installed application on October 10. Despite the ambitious goals, the project has faced significant challenges, with 579 open issues reported by users of versions 0.5 and 0.6. Additionally, performance budgets have not been met, and the software struggles with file interchange, as PSDs created by the project are not reliably accepted by Photoshop.
In just two weeks since its first commit on September 30, the repository has seen 2,152 commits, 1,004 merged pull requests, and 539,017 lines of Rust code across 1,306 files. The project has attracted contributions from 317 distinct contributors, indicating a collaborative effort beyond Thomas’s initial solo development.
User feedback has been mixed. One Reddit commenter criticized the Photoshop clone, stating that basic functionalities, such as the eye dropper tool, are not working as expected. Another user reported issues with the RAW pipeline, noting that adjustments to images from a Sony a7c camera resulted in undesirable noise and banding.
Source: InfoQ