ArtCraft Crafting Apps: 13 Rust Apps Taking On Adobe, Office and AutoCAD in 2026

Hello HaWkers, in less than three weeks a GitHub organization called storytold published 13 open source applications that mimic Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AutoCAD, Figma and Pro Tools. All written in Rust, all under the MIT or Apache-2.0 license. The first repository, PhotoCraft, was created on September 30, 2026 and now has over 65K stars. Add up all 13 apps and you get more than 160K stars.

The detail that made the topic blow up on Hacker News: according to coverage from Phoronix and IT-Connect, a large share of this code was written by AI agents running in parallel. So the question that matters for anyone paying for software subscriptions, or anyone building software that lives off subscriptions, is simple: is this already good enough for real work, or is it just an impressive demo?

In this article you will see what the Crafting Apps are, what each one promises, what the maintainers themselves admit is still missing, how to try them without taking risks, and what this movement changes in product strategy for anyone selling SaaS.

What the ArtCraft Crafting Apps Are

ArtCraft existed before this wave. The storytold/artcraft repository, created in 2022, is an AI creation tool with around 31K stars. The project is led by Brandon Thomas, described by the tech press as the former CEO of storyteller.ai.

The news is the family called Crafting Apps: "clean-room" reimplementations of famous commercial software. Clean-room means the team says it implements everything from public specifications and the observed behavior of the programs, without looking at the original source code and without copying icons, fonts, themes or templates.

The numbers below come from the GitHub API, queried on October 17, 2026:

App	Mimics	Stars	Repository created
PhotoCraft	Photoshop	65.4K	Sep 30, 2026
PdfCraft	Acrobat	15.2K	Sep 30, 2026
FilmCraft	Premiere Pro	14.3K	Sep 30, 2026
WordCraft	Word	13.8K	Oct 7, 2026
LightCraft	Lightroom	13.3K	Sep 30, 2026
VectorCraft	Illustrator	9.5K	Sep 30, 2026
EffectCraft	After Effects	7.1K	Oct 1, 2026
GridCraft	Excel	5.5K	Oct 7, 2026
CADCraft	AutoCAD	5.5K	Oct 7, 2026
DesignCraft	InDesign	4.3K	Oct 1, 2026
DeckCraft	PowerPoint	3.6K	Oct 7, 2026
SoundCraft	Pro Tools	3.1K	Oct 7, 2026
FigCraft	Figma	2.3K	Oct 9, 2026

Besides the 13 apps, there is the ArtCraft Launcher (craft-launcher, around 3K stars), a native app, also in Rust, that installs, updates and opens all the others. It checks every download against a SHA-256 checksum before installing and has a UI in 11 languages.

Why Rust and Why It Matters

All the apps follow the same conventions: 100% Rust, no Electron, no mandatory account and no telemetry, according to IT-Connect. They run on Windows (x64, arm64 and x86), universal macOS, Linux (x86_64, aarch64 and riscv64), FreeBSD 14 and in the browser via WebAssembly. PhotoCraft, for example, uses a GPU compositor built on wgpu, which speaks Metal, Vulkan, DX12 and WebGPU, with a CPU compositor serving as a reference to test the first one.

If you follow the ecosystem, you have already seen this movement on other fronts. I wrote about it in Rust in 2026: why the most loved language is winning the market. The difference here is scale: this is not a command line tool, these are entire desktop suites.

The Role of AI: 13 Apps in Three Weeks

This is the point that splits opinions. Phoronix reported on October 7, 2026 that PhotoCraft, FilmCraft and LightCraft were built mainly by AI agents like Claude Code. IT-Connect, in an October 8 article, described eight Claude Opus 5.5 agents running in parallel, a model Anthropic released on September 22, 2026.

The repositories do not hide it. They all have CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files at the root, and the READMEs tell "new contributors and AI agents" to start with AGENTS.md.

The release cadence confirms the machine pace. A hands-on test published on October 13 recorded that PhotoCraft went from version 0.1.0 to 0.8.2 between October 2 and 12, and that the 12 apps that existed at the time all shipped a release on the same day, the 12th. Ten minor versions in ten days is not the pace of a traditional human team.

There are two readings of this, and both are true at the same time:

The optimistic one: reimplementing known behavior, with a public specification and a corpus of files to test against, is exactly the kind of task where agents deliver a lot. PhotoCraft has more than 1,700 tests, and that is what lets it iterate fast without breaking everything.
The skeptical one: volume of code is not product quality. Nobody outside the project has audited the clean-room claim, and the author of the hands-on test did not evaluate code quality.

What Actually Works Today

The most honest part of the project is the READMEs, which include parity estimates made by the maintainers themselves. They are worth reading carefully, because they separate "has the button" from "you can work with it".

PhotoCraft: calls itself "early alpha" and states plainly that it is "not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work". When re-saving PSD files, rendering matches on 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set. Generative features, 15 tools and plug-in compatibility are missing.
WordCraft: covers about 88% of Word's ribbon features and estimates itself at roughly 60% of the way to replacing Word for real work. It reads and writes .docx, .odt, .rtf, .html, .md, .tex and imports legacy .doc.
GridCraft: implements 513 of Excel's 523 spreadsheet functions, including LET, LAMBDA and XLOOKUP, and estimates itself at about 50% ready for real work.
DeckCraft: estimates 84% of PowerPoint's feature breadth and 55% of the way to replacing it. It opens and saves .pptx and exports PDF, PNG and animated GIF.
CADCraft: reads DXF from R12 to 2018, writes DXF R2000 and works with DWG through the open source acadrust library. It warns that entities not yet modeled are dropped on save.
FigCraft: opens .fig files on a "best effort" basis, without validation against real Figma documents, and estimates itself at 49% of the way.

The October 13 hands-on test only ran PhotoCraft 0.8.2 and PdfCraft 0.7.1, on headless Linux arm64. Both worked for scripted and MCP editing. The other ten apps were not tested.

How to Try Them Without Taking Risks

The safest way to experiment is to build from source, in a test folder, with files that are not your originals. CADCraft requires Rust 1.95 or later for desktop and web builds, and the launcher requires Rust 1.90.

# Check your Rust version (CADCraft requires 1.95+ on desktop)
rustc --version
rustup update stable

# On Debian/Ubuntu, install the windowing headers used by the launcher first
sudo apt install libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev \
  libxrandr-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

# Clone and open CADCraft with a sample drawing
git clone https://github.com/storytold/cadcraft
cd cadcraft
cargo run --release -p cadcraft -- --sample

# Or build the launcher, which installs and updates the other apps
git clone https://github.com/storytold/craft-launcher
cd craft-launcher
cargo run --release -p artcraft-launcher

If you would rather not build anything, the GitHub releases ship MSI and ZIP for Windows, DMG for macOS and AppImage, .deb, .rpm, Flatpak and tarball for Linux.

The CLI Is the Best Entry Point

For developers, the most useful part today is not the GUI but the CLI. It runs without a window, fits into a CI pipeline and does not depend on the app being mature in usability.

# Convert a Word document to PDF without opening any window
wordcraft-cli convert relatorio.docx relatorio.pdf

# Extract only the text from a .docx (great for indexing or summarizing)
wordcraft-cli text relatorio.docx

# Read a range from an Excel spreadsheet straight in the terminal
gridcraft-cli cat orcamento.xlsx --range B4:F15

# Evaluate an Excel formula without opening a spreadsheet
gridcraft-cli eval '=XLOOKUP("b",{"a","b"},{1,2})'

# Render the DeckCraft sample slides as images in the out/ folder
cargo run --release -p deckcraft-cli -- render --sample --all --scale 1 out/

This kind of command solves an annoying, real problem: converting and inspecting Office files on a Linux server without installing a whole suite.

Built for Agents: MCP in Every App

The most interesting product detail of the Crafting Apps is not that they mimic Adobe. It is that every command in every app can be triggered by a script or an AI agent, via CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server. DeckCraft talks about more than 200 commands with undo, and GridCraft exposes tools like read_range, write_range, evaluate_formula and insert_chart.

If you are not familiar with the protocol yet, read my article on the Model Context Protocol as the standard for AI agents. In practice, registering the apps in Claude Code takes one line each, according to the READMEs:

# Headless MCP server: the agent manipulates documents without opening a window
claude mcp add wordcraft -- wordcraft-cli mcp
claude mcp add gridcraft -- gridcraft-cli mcp

# Bridge mode: the agent controls an open WordCraft window
wordcraft --control 7981 &
claude mcp add wordcraft-app -- wordcraft-cli mcp --connect 127.0.0.1:7981

The October hands-on test left a useful warning: MCP requests sent back to back, without waiting for a response, were not processed in order. One command arrived before doc_open and failed. If you automate, wait for each response before sending the next one.

Pin Versions Before You Automate

With a release a day, a script that works today can break tomorrow. The author of the hands-on test recommends pinning versions. This Node.js script queries the public GitHub API and shows the latest release of each app, so you can decide which version to lock:

// List the latest release of each Crafting App using the public GitHub API
// Run with: node craft-releases.mjs (Node 18+ ships native fetch)
const apps = [
  'photocraft', 'pdfcraft', 'wordcraft', 'gridcraft',
  'deckcraft', 'cadcraft', 'figcraft',
];

async function ultimaRelease(repo) {
  const res = await fetch(
    `https://api.github.com/repos/storytold/${repo}/releases/latest`,
    { headers: { Accept: 'application/vnd.github+json' } },
  );
  // 404 means the repository has not published a release yet
  if (!res.ok) return { repo, versao: 'sem release', data: '-' };
  const json = await res.json();
  return {
    repo,
    versao: json.tag_name,
    data: json.published_at.slice(0, 10),
  };
}

const resultados = await Promise.all(apps.map(ultimaRelease));
console.table(resultados);
// Use the "versao" column to lock the download in your CI script

The unauthenticated API is limited to 60 requests per hour per IP, so do not put this in a tight loop.

What This Changes for People Who Sell Software

Here is why this article sits on the product shelf and not just the dev one. For a long time, the moat around a suite like Adobe's or Microsoft's was the cost of rebuilding decades of functionality. The Crafting Apps do not prove that moat is gone, but they show it is shallower than it looked.

Three practical lessons for anyone designing products:

Feature parity became a commodity faster. If your edge is "we have button X", a small team with agents can get close in weeks. Value moves to what is not in the menu: reliability, fine-grained file compatibility, support, collaboration and a plug-in ecosystem. Notice that this is exactly where the READMEs admit the biggest gaps.
Automation became a first-class feature. Apps born with CLI and MCP on every command fit into the workflow of people who work with agents. If your product can only be operated by clicking, it is left out of that workflow.
No account and no telemetry is a selling point. We already saw this with LibreOffice hitting a download record without AI: part of the audience chooses software for what it does not do.

The Risks Nobody Should Ignore

It is not all celebration. Specialized coverage points out that reimplementing features is usually allowed, but closely copying the look of another product, the so-called trade dress, can lead to a lawsuit. IT-Connect notes that Adobe holds thousands of patents on software features. As far as has been reported, Adobe has not commented.

There is also a licensing point that slips by: the code is MIT or Apache-2.0, but the ArtCraft name, the logo and the "A" mark are not covered by that license. Anyone who forks it needs to remove the branding.

And there is operational risk. One report says the download links disappeared from the ArtCraft website, although the GitHub repositories still offer the builds. For a project only a few weeks old and, apparently, with very concentrated leadership, the question "who will maintain this a year from now?" is fair.

Can You Cancel Your Subscription?

For daily professional work, not yet, and the maintainers themselves say so. The "real work" parity numbers sit between 49% and 60% in the apps that publish that estimate.

But there are uses that already make sense today:

File conversion and inspection on a server: wordcraft-cli and gridcraft-cli handle pipeline tasks without installing a commercial suite.
Scripted image and PDF editing: PhotoCraft and PdfCraft were the only ones independently validated, and they worked in that scenario.
Agent automation prototypes: testing a flow where the agent builds a spreadsheet or a presentation via MCP, with throwaway files.
Architecture study: for anyone who wants to learn Rust applied to large desktop software, these repositories are rare material.

What I would not do: open a client's only .dwg file in CADCraft and save over it, or swap the team's Figma for FigCraft on a Friday. CADCraft itself warns that it drops entities it does not understand yet.

Outlook

The Crafting Apps are, at the same time, one of the strongest demonstrations so far of what AI agents can build and a reminder that building is not the same as sustaining. The coming months will show whether the project attracts human maintainers, whether file compatibility reaches a professional level, and how Adobe, Microsoft and Autodesk react.

For anyone working in product, the lesson is already clear: what protects software now is less the feature list and more everything that comes after it.

Let's go! 🦅

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This article covered ArtCraft's Crafting Apps and what they mean for people who use and people who sell software, but the ecosystem changes every week and not everything becomes an article here.

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