AI Ambition: ArtCraft Cloned Photoshop and Now Wants to "Rebuild Everything"

At the AI Engineer Code Summit in San Francisco, ArtCraft founder and CEO Brandon Thomas presented his company's AI-based open source manifesto, describing how it built a Photoshop alternative called PhotoCraft in Rust from a detailed prompt and has since released 17 open source versions of popular tools, including clones of Acrobat, Figma and a word processor called WordCraft. Thomas said PhotoCraft is still not at 100% parity with Photoshop (just past 60%), that the apps are being downloaded about 1.7 million times per day, and that the open source community has grown to roughly 4,000 developers. He also said Rust was essential to performance, that agents handle desktop apps and games while humans do backend work and API design, and that ArtCraft plans to open source AutoCraft, a fully autonomous software factory.