PhotoCraft: An Open-Source Rust Photoshop Clone, and Why "Closed Source Is Dead" Overreaches

On October 7, 2026, a GitHub repository set social media on fire. PhotoCraft, from the ArtCraft team, calls itself "an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop, rebuilt in pure Rust." It has about 9,400 stars and 1,200 forks, and open-source veteran Eric S. Raymond called it "the doom I predicted a few days ago," concluding: "Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead." That tweet passed 1.8 million views.

The excitement is understandable. The hyperbole is not supported by the project's own README, which says plainly that PhotoCraft is in early alpha and not yet a Photoshop replacement. This post separates what the repository actually shows from what has been inferred, explains how the project is built, and says what it means for developers and designers.

TL;DR: the questions people are asking

What PhotoCraft claims to be

The README is detailed and unusually candid. Key points:

• Familiar by design. Menus, shortcuts, panels and tools follow Photoshop conventions, "from ⌘J to ⇧⌘D."
• Fast. A GPU compositor on wgpu (Metal, Vulkan, DX12, WebGPU), copy-on-write tiles and multithreaded filters. No Electron or web view. A radius-180 Gaussian blur on a 3.6-megapixel image is said to take under a second.
• Real PSD files. Open, edit and save layered Photoshop documents.
• Agent-ready. Every menu item, tool and dialog runs a command from a single registry of 500-plus commands, reachable from the UI, a CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server.
• 34 tools, a brush engine with pressure and tilt, groups, clipping masks, smart objects, 27 blend modes, RGB, grayscale, CMYK and Lab at 8, 16 and 32 bits, ICC color management, and import and export for PSD, PSB, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, OpenEXR and more.
• Adjustment layers and live filters, including Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, a Blur Gallery, distortions and Oil Paint, with previews through selections.

Every screenshot in the README is described as the real app rendered offscreen through its control channel, using public-domain artwork such as paintings by Monet, Hokusai and Van Gogh and NASA's Earthrise photograph.

The honest status section

The most informative paragraph in the repository is its status note. It says much of Photoshop's feature surface "exists in some form, but it is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work." The biggest gaps are listed as:

• AI and generative features.
• About twenty missing tools.
• Depth in typography and professional workflows.
• Plug-in compatibility.

It adds that every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command, "but that measures wiring, not behaviour," and it asks users to expect rough edges and file issues. The repository shows 103 open issues and 53 open pull requests at the time we looked. That honesty is a point in the project's favor. It also undercuts the claim that this "nuked" Adobe. A tool that matches the menu structure is not the same as a tool that matches a decade of professional behavior and ecosystem.

How it was built: claims versus speculation

Raymond's tweet speculates that the developers "decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM with an instruction to generate Rust." He later said the developer has done clean-room reimplementations of the whole Adobe suite, pointing to the other "Crafting Apps."

Two things should be kept apart.

What the repository states. PhotoCraft is "clean-room: implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets." The PSD crate is "written from Adobe's public specification and tested against a corpus of real-world files." The project also disclaims any affiliation with Adobe and uses Adobe's trademarks only to describe compatibility.

What is speculation. The decompile-and-spec pipeline is Raymond's guess, offered in a way that reads as a hypothesis ("no prizes for guessing"). We have seen no evidence for it, and no evidence against it either, because the repository does not document its development process in that detail. The README mentions AGENTS.md and says new contributors and AI agents should start there, which suggests AI-assisted development, but that does not tell us what inputs were used.

Whether a process counts as clean-room in the legal sense depends on facts we cannot see, such as who had access to what, and it is a matter for lawyers and courts, not social media. We would treat any confident claim, in either direction, as premature.

What makes it credible as engineering

Regardless of provenance, several design choices are the kind that make a large rewrite viable.

• A test corpus as ground truth. The project tests against real Photoshop-authored files and standard corpora. It reports that re-saving renders the same for 307 of 309 psd-tools test files and 169 of 170 in another set, that a composite oracle compares its render with Photoshop's own merged image, and that 116 of 116 shape layers in its corpus match pixels. These are self-reported, and the README is careful to say re-saved files are not byte-identical to the source.
• Two compositors tested against each other. A CPU reference "oracle" and a GPU compositor, so correctness has an anchor.
• Layered architecture enforced at build time across 24 crates, with a pure-data document model and a command engine under a thin UI.
• More than 1,700 tests, including round trips, generators and multi-depth checks.
• Bit depth and color model as runtime data, so tools work at every depth.

This is the pattern that makes AI-assisted rewrites plausible: a precise target, an oracle to compare against and an enormous number of tests. We saw the same logic in other rewrites, such as Bun's move from Zig to Rust, DHH's Rust rewrite experiment and OpenCut's rewrite with plugins and a headless MCP interface.

Why "closed source is dead" overreaches

Raymond's argument is that fast, cheap code generation will fill in missing features, so any closed product can be cloned. That is a serious point, and it deserves a serious response, not a dismissal.

What it gets right. The cost of writing a lot of correct-looking code has fallen sharply, and a well-specified target with a good test suite is exactly where AI assistance shines. File-format compatibility, a hard moat in the past, is the kind of problem a corpus can verify. Small teams can now attempt projects that once needed large companies.

What it leaves out.

• The last 20 percent. Professional tools win on edge cases, performance on huge files, color accuracy, print workflows and stability under strange inputs. PhotoCraft's own gap list names several.
• Ecosystem. Plug-ins, brushes, presets, tutorials, training materials, interchange with other tools and the habits of millions of users are not in the code.
• Services and AI features. Adobe's value includes cloud storage, fonts, stock libraries and generative models, which a clone does not provide.
• Support, trust and liability. Enterprises buy accountability, not only features.
• Maintenance. A codebase generated quickly still needs years of fixes, security work and a community.
• Legal and trademark risk. Clean-room claims are tested when someone challenges them.

So the fair reading is that PhotoCraft is a striking proof of how much can be built quickly, and a challenge to the pricing and lock-in of mature software, not evidence that a billion-dollar product disappeared overnight. The same discipline applies to any bold claim, as in our checklist for judging an unverified AI math claim: ask what was verified and what was only asserted.

What it means for developers and designers

If you are a designer or photographer, you can try it, but do not move paid work onto an alpha tool without backups. The PSD round trip is promising, yet re-saving can rewrite resources and layer records, so keep your originals untouched and test on copies.

If you build software, note the agent-first design. A single command registry that the UI, CLI, JSON channel and MCP server all share is a pattern worth copying, because it makes the app scriptable by humans and agents alike. Our guide to Cosmic Desktop's policy on AI-generated code shows the opposite end of the debate, where some open-source projects restrict AI-written contributions.

If you run a product company, treat this as a signal about your moat. Features that exist only because they were expensive to build are less defensible. Data, distribution, trust, integrations and service quality matter more.

If you contribute to open source, the repository's contributor guide points AI agents to AGENTS.md and docs, an example of projects writing instructions for machine contributors.

How to evaluate it in an hour

1. Read the README status section and the roadmap's parity assessment before installing.
2. Install a release build for your OS from GitHub releases, or build with cargo run --release -p photocraft -- image.psd.
3. Open a PSD you know well, with layers, masks, type and styles, and compare it with your usual editor.
4. Test your real workflow: a typical retouch, a composite or a text-heavy layout.
5. Check color: a CMYK or wide-gamut file, if you use them.
6. Try the CLI or MCP server on a batch job to see the agent angle.
7. Record what breaks and file issues with your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot, as the maintainers ask.
8. Do not use proprietary files you are not allowed to share in public bug reports.

What this means for what you build or pay

For most people, nothing changes today. Adobe subscriptions are not obsolete because of an early alpha. But the direction is clear: mature, closed software now faces credible open competitors that arrive faster than before, and the price of switching is dropping. If you pay for a creative suite, this is a useful point in a negotiation and a reason to keep your files in open formats. If you build tools, assume that features copyable from public specs will be copied.

Related reading

• Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust
• DHH's Fable Rust rewrite and 11 million tokens
• OpenCut's rewrite: plugins and a headless MCP interface
• Cosmic Desktop bans AI-generated code
• WebGPU: a complete guide
• Meta's Rebalancer: an open-source solver
• Boris Cherny's Opus 5.5 interactive companion

Primary: the storytold/photocraft repository and README (October 2026) · Eric S. Raymond's posts on X (October 7, 2026)

Details are accurate as of October 7, 2026 and come from the repository README and public posts. We have not built or tested PhotoCraft, we could not verify how it was developed, and legal questions about clean-room practice are for qualified counsel. Adobe and Photoshop are trademarks of Adobe Inc.; this post is not affiliated with Adobe or the PhotoCraft project.