Developer Behind the AI-Built Adobe Clones Says They Are “Not Anywhere Close to Ready
A developer used Claude Opus 5.5 to build open-source replacements for seven Adobe applications, promoted them across Reddit with a projection of roughly 100% parity within a month, then told Hacker News the project was not anywhere close to ready. Its own roadmap puts it at 45% ready for real work and 2,300 to 4,100 agent-hours from full parity. By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Brandon Thomas, the developer behind open-source AI-built Adobe application clones, has stated that the projects are "not anywhere close to ready." Thomas posted an announcement on Hacker News, showcasing AI-generated open-source alternatives to seven Adobe applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
He claimed that the applications were being built with Claude Opus 5.5 and WebAssembly builds for the browser, mirroring the functionality of the original Adobe programs. All of the applications are released under MIT and Apache licenses.
Thomas's project documentation states that feature breadth is at around 76%, but the readiness for real work is estimated at around 45%. While a mainstream practitioner might achieve 43% of the features, someone focusing on core features is estimated to complete 61%. Thomas predicts that beta testing will take 1,100 to 1,800 hours, and full parity, or completion of all features, will require an additional 2,300 to 4,100 hours of work with Claude Opus 5.5.
The target for Photoshop is named Photoshop 2026, version 27.11.0, based on the installed application on October 10.
The project has faced significant challenges, with over 579 open issues reported by users of versions 0.5 and 0.6. Performance budgets have not been met, and PSDs (Photoshop Document files) written in the open-source project are not reliably accepted by the original Adobe Photoshop. The development process has been extensive, with 2,152 commits, 1,004 merged pull requests, and 539,017 lines of Rust code across 1,306 files in the repository, authored by 317 distinct contributors.
Despite the effort, critics have pointed out the numerous limitations of the AI-generated applications, such as lack of RAW support for different camera models and issues with the RAW pipeline.
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