Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt in Rust and released it as OSS | Hacker News Reader

Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt in Rust and released it as OSS

bsky.app

34 pointsjbredeche27 comments

This looks more like spam... there is no de-compilation.. an LLM based vibe-code app is no adobe alternative, and gimp is already opensourced and covers the same workflows. They are also charging for these new apps on their site. Additionally, they themselves have this disclosure:

"Important Status: PhotoCraft is in early alpha, and we want to be straight about where it stands: 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 Al/generative features, about twenty missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility. Every Photoshop menu item is wired to a command (docs/parity.md), but that measures wiring, not behaviour. The honest, dimension-by- dimension picture and where we're going next are in the roadmap's parity assessment. Expect rough edges, and please file issues (include your OS, document size, layer count and a screenshot). You can also tell us what broke on Discord."

> gimp is already opensourced and covers the same workflows

It's funny because just a few days ago there was this person in here implying that apparently GIMP (and Inkscape and Krita) are bad and their solution is... vibecoded ai slop:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959674

If this is actually based on decompilation, they're going to get sued into oblivion. If it's a reverse engineering project based on behavioral observation... it's probably relatively thin, and the question becomes whether the maintainer(s) are going to invest enough effort into it to merit user trust. Given how massive the feature sprawl of Adobe CC is, getting from zero to something is pretty easy. Maintenance, completeness, and meriting trust are a lot harder.

The thing is - agents are fantastic for creating those behavioral observations, too. Describe in English is not a problem for a language model.

I've got 75% of Animal Crossing done the same way. I assume Nintendo will try to kill me... but I am following the rules of reverse engineering. Because it's super easy to do now.

The world is a runaway train. Who knows how it will all end.

This has been posted a few times already, and no, it's not decompiled from real Photoshop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981449

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986072

How do we know

That was on here yesterday or so already and the feedback was, condensed and friendly, rather something like "unusable".

I'm quite mixed on this if it's a positive or not.. But I have to say, their website did give me a good chuckle.

> Built the hard way.

> Every Crafting App is written from scratch in Rust and held to the same rules.

Nothing says “built the hard way” like a CLAUDE.md file in every repo.

Want me to make it sound more human-like?

I think the greater concern should be the increasing viability of spinning up your own personal version of any SaaS product, especially if you constrain it to only the parts you need. These products are made to appeal to as broad a user base as possible, and a lot of personalization is missing by default. Users don't have to sacrifice personal needs due to software scarcity anymore.

We're about to revive the Apple vs Microsoft lawsuits of the 90's over "look and feel"

Why link to some dude's bluesky instead of to the original source? https://getartcraft.com/apps

It's funny to talk about the "original source" of a copyright washing project.

lol yeah you're right but the OPs link doesn't really add anything to the discussion.

In a similar vein, https://redlamp.app

Are we getting to the point (in a few years maybe?) where software will have its Suno moment where there is no need to actually pre-create it on some occasions.

It’s just created when required and personalised to exactly that use case. Then either reused or just discarded.

That is a weird world if so.

Or maybe we all have our own personalised version of photoshop that Adobe allow you to modify and still keep paying them.

I've been telling everyone who will listen for the last few months that this is the inevitable end point of software development.

What do you think comes next instead?

I mean 1) hell yeah that's sick and 2) the front-end software isn't the moat typically, it's the cloud service with stuff like collaboration and storage, maybe even render?

They are clean-room implementations based on their GitHub:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

Aw man... now my Animal Crossing clean room implementation won't be a huge surprise.

Dang it. Gotta get one week faster.

why do you think decompilation is needed ?

Why is this story being censored?

A clean-room reverse engineered Photoshop is huge and important news.

Are we hiding from reality now?

The Adobe suite is just the start - they've made "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of many other apps: https://github.com/storytold

When they say ‘clean room’. What do they mean by that exactly?

It wouldn’t have access to the actual code anyway. Do they mean they just describe all the features? Not even screen shots?

I guess each model now knows all the menus and what photoshop does really well anyway from the computer use training.

> When they say ‘clean room’. What do they mean by that exactly?

I don't know what they mean - but I can tell you what I mean when I do the same thing.

The new code is written without looking at the original from an English description of the software's behavior. According to the rules of reverse engineering, this is allowed.

Of course, the problem is that agents can now do this trivially. So.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com