Cliff’s Note:
A guy with an AI subscription built free clones of seven Adobe apps in about a week. Lawrence Winnerman spent twenty-five years inside Microsoft and Amazon, and he knows exactly what this is: Napster, round two. He’s also seen who walked away with the money last time.
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—Cliff
On September 30, a developer named Brandon Thomas started posting code to GitHub. Within a week he had 7 repositories up, each a free, open-source stand-in for an Adobe product: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat. He wrote them in Rust, a coding language, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, a model that had been on sale for 8 days when he started. He says he “one-shotted Photoshop.” That means he gave the AI tool one detailed instruction, and then let it run until it was complete. Adobe charges $69.99 a month for the suite. The clones cost nothing.
For now, they are also kind of a mess. The Gaussian blur in the Photoshop clone misbehaves, and the project’s own README admits it is “not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work.” Adobe will lean on that sentence for as long as it stays true. I give it until Thanksgiving.
Eric S. Raymond, the open-source elder, looked at the repos and guessed Thomas must have decompiled Adobe’s code, turned it into a specification, and had the machine write fresh Rust from the spec. “Adobe just got nuked,” he wrote. “And closed source is dead, dead, dead.” The project says otherwise. It calls itself a clean-room reimplementation, built from public specifications and observed behavior, with no Adobe code anywhere in it.
People have argued all week about which version is true, and the argument misses what matters, because the clean-room version is the scarier one for Adobe. Clean-room cloning has been legal in this country for 40 years. In the early 1980s, Compaq spent about $1 million having one team describe what IBM’s BIOS did and a second team, which had never seen IBM’s code, write new code to match. Phoenix Technologies did the same in 1984 and sold the result to anyone who wanted it. In 1992 the Ninth Circuit ruled in Sega v. Accolade that taking a program apart to learn how it works can be fair use. Copyright protects the code. It does not protect what the code does.
What protected Photoshop all these years was the payroll. Cloning it meant a building full of engineers and several years of their lives, and nobody sane would spend that to give the result away. That bill now fits on a credit card. And if Thomas did decompile something, he broke a license agreement, which makes him a defendant.
Adobe can sue Brandon Thomas. It cannot sue every kid with a $200 AI subscription and a long weekend.
The games went first, and they show where this is going to end up. Fans spent 6 years, starting in July 2020, decompiling Super Smash Bros. Melee by hand; AI tools helped close out the last stretch, and the project hit 100% on September 7. An unofficial PC port of Fable II, the Xbox 360 game, was running in about an hour with a free open-weight model doing the work. One developer ran as many as 15 AI agents for 3 months, burned through more than 600 billion tokens, and rebuilt an unnamed first-person shooter so exactly that 83% of its functions match the original byte for byte. Then he took his earlier posts down. “Corporate America,” he wrote, “was here to ruin our fun.”
Literally as I was writing this, a story broke on Twitter (X) that drives the stake deeper into the heart of traditional software giants. Click subscribe and read which companies are in the target next—and what this could do to your stock portfolio.
