A free, open-source Photoshop alternative in pure Rust — vibe-coded with Claude Opus 5.5
PhotoCraft is an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust — and one of the most audacious vibe-coding demos of 2026. Its creator, Atlanta-based developer Brandon Thomas, announced in his own release posts that he recreated 7 of Adobe's top applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat Pro, After Effects and InDesign — released as PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, PrintCraft, EffectCraft and DesignCraft under the ArtCraft umbrella) using Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust, and published the work open source.
The numbers are startling for a project announced days ago: over 21,900 stars and 2,800 forks on GitHub, with commits still landing today. PhotoCraft runs natively — no Electron, no web view — with copy-on-write tiles, multithreaded filters, GPU backends (Vulkan, DX12, WebGPU), and support for opening real PSDs. Every screenshot in its repo is the real app at work on public-domain art, rendered offscreen through its control channel.
What to make of it: the quality is rough in places (early hands-on reports call it "glitchy but real"), and Adobe-scale applications are a decades-long undertaking. But as a statement about where vibe coding can reach when paired with a strong systems language, PhotoCraft is hard to ignore — 21,900 stars in a week is the market voting with its bookmarks.