I wonder if this is why I've seen a lot videos popping up on my youtube feed related to vibe coded clones of various commercial apps in the past few days. Everything from clones of flagship products from Adob to Microsoft Office.
Adobe product clones like Photoshop and Illustrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFB79TYI-Vw
Adobe after effects clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mi_tYSdkWQ
MS Office suite clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_jTYMOlXio
No, we explicitly do not use reverse engineering. We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room:
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (inspired by Photoshop)
https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft (inspired by Word)
https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft (one of the more mature apps)
https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (another app close to 1:1 parity)
(etc.)
Using REA for something as high profile as what we're doing is likely to result in lawsuits. We're doing everything we can by the books.
We cannot look at Adobe sources. Use of Ghidra is disallowed.
REA is probably great for personal apps and for abandonware, but I think if you publish the results and it's found to have decompiled the original proprietary sources in discovery, you might be in for a bad time.
Using an LLM is not a clean room, imo. Its just IP laundering. Which is fine I guess if everyone is doing it, including the companies you're stealing from. I just dont know what the implications will be for progress.
Licensing/copyrighting encouraged people to think up of new things, and new ways of doing something. Now we're just all copying eachother.
What intellectual property is being laundered here if it's not even the same ecosystem (C++ vs Rust)? If it's so easy, and you just need to rebatch something existing, why has nobody done this over the last 20 years?
Adobe almost certainly has patents covering aspects of Photoshops design and tools?
Microsoft famously has patents covering aspects of the ribbon interface in Microsoft office, which of course this suite must implement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(user_interface)#Patent...
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has a policy that says screenshots of applications have to be "as small a version as possible" in order to meet the fair use exception for presentation of copyright work. I can only imagine an exact clone of the interface could be similarly ruled to infringe on Adobe's intellectual property.
Copyright is so flawed... This would mean an hommage is a breach of intellectual property in general, even if you paint it completely differently (say watercolor vs oil)
Your brain is an IP laundering machine. And it has been doing that even before we had any IP laws.
I agree. The vast amount of data ingested and internalized by LLMs has effectively been "laundered". But they are so powerful and evolving so fast that no one can be spared of their impact. We have to to learn to live with it. Traditional proprietary software being "laundered" is just one part of the broader story...
all human culture and creation is a form of "ip laundering" i guess
Doesn't clean room typically apply to cases where the "dirty" team has legitimate access to copyrighted code, like the IBM PC BIOS which was published in the technical reference manual, and uses this access to write a functional specification for the "clean" team?
I'm not sure how clean room would apply to commercial applications distributed in binary form, as there's no way to look at even disassembled code without violating the license agreement and therefore being in breach of contract and subject to potential copyright infringement claims for copying or even continuing to use the software, let alone cloning it, and surely you're not going to be subject to a copyright claim based on familiarity with the application from merely using it.
The issue is that LLMs very likely have access to the source code of these products as part of their training data, and are then being used to generate clones. There's no barrier in the middle to ensure copyright violations don't leak
The reason why 'reverse engineering' has gotten so good is because what we're actually seeing is fully automated luxury plagiarism
It is very unlikely that LLM had access to original source code of Photoshop.
> It is very unlikely that LLM had access to original source code of Photoshop.
It doesn’t matter. It’s likely had access to the knowledge of somebody who worked on that source code.
I have worked at companies that have done clean-room implementations. I was not permitted to look at their source or interact with those teams, because I had been exposed to the source of what they were re-implementing in a prior job.
As a human with a mushy brain I was never going to remember the source, but the fact I had been proximate to it was enough to lock me out. You have no idea what the LLM trained on, so you can’t prove a LLM derived clone is a “clean-room” implementation.
Some questionable idea that the LLM "had access to the knowledge of somebody who worked on Photoshop source code" seems like a poor basis to allege it's not a clean room implementation.
Wouldn't the burden of proof here be on Adobe if they wanted to make such an argument?
It could have access for code of an older version with how there has been leaks of sources of various commercial applications over the years.
They have had access to plenty of A/GPL software. They are all highly problematic from an ethical and legal point of view.
If adobe use any AI tools to help develop photoshop, its all been loaded in. Or if its ever ended up anywhere on the internet, even in private
The first part (re: AI tools) is ostensibly not true. It all depends on the degree to which the data that they "don't train on" gets laundered and anonymized to the point where they are able to justify training on it without it being "yours" any more.
And I don't think that is publicly known at the current time. (If anyone has any tangible info on this, the please let me know...)
The practical uses are more applicable to laundering open source code covered by copyleft licensing like GNU.
This is novel Rust/egui code that I imagine looks nothing like Adobe code. I've never seen their code, but it must be a mess of old C++, right?
It's considerably faster than their apps (at startup) too.
Well I hope they trust their LLMs completely, because I'm sure Adobe is currently going over their source code with a very fine comb to build a case. And they have LLMs to help with comparing too.
People made new and better things just like companies without copyright too. In recent times companies made things worse too.
Please don't take offence by this, but:
If AI models can generate designs faster and produce work that is "good enough", what is the actual future of design tools and the design profession in your opinion?
I've tested this myself with some frontier models and the results are kinda impressive enough that it raised the question if design skills are already obsolete. If that is the case, what use are these tools now?
In the future everything will be some form of command line interface. Don’t worry about design.
Good enough is not really good enough.
I've seen a lot of "really cool unique designs" that are obviously just a digested regurgitation of amalgamated corporate slop. Anyone wanting an actual unique design language needs to hire actual designers.
Those designers may use AI tools but the tooling isn't to where they can be completely replaced. I challenge anyone to show me an e2e LLM design toolkit that can actually replace a designer, not just one shotted "wow that looks so cool" character designs.
> We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room
AFAIK clean room does not forbid decompilation, I meant that's how it's been done for ages. What's important is that the observer does not write the code, to avoid being impressed by the decompiled one, risking creating a copy close enough to deem it copyright infringing on the original.
Because the copyright applies to the actual code.
How do you know llms you are using were not trained on decompiled apps?
why would that matter? That sounds like a problem between Adobe and the AI companies.
Would love to see an InDesign clone that supports writing to and from their proprietary format.
The death of IP in the west. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows. Definitely the start of something big though.
Mightn't be so bad if all the value wasn't being captured by trillion dollar corps, despite them benefiting off the labor and creativity of countless non consenting individuals
Those trillion dollar corps also employ millions of people in very high paying jobs. And the extraordinary stock returns have made their engineers (and countless public investors) wealthy across the past half century.
People wishing for the death of the mega corps, are directly wishing for the obliteration of millions of great jobs.
I’m not sure people are “wishing for the death” in the literal sense.
We just need to apply the antitrust law and break these trillion-dollar corps into smaller competing corps.
There’s no reason for a single company to provide your email, browser, search, operating system, entertainment, AI, etc.
How many of those jobs do you expect them to retain as they build increasingly capable models?
How much of the profit will be redistributed to all the artists, programmers, scientists, etc. whose works are the foundation of their product?
The poorest 50% of global citizens hold the same combined wealth as the top 10 individuals.
How are massive and increasingly concentrated corporate profits going to help them? (Or anyone else for that matter).
well they won't give me one of those great jobs
>People wishing for the death of the mega corps, are directly wishing for the obliteration of millions of great jobs.
Yeah, I'll take the obliteration of a few million overpaid American jobs over the destruction of hundreds of millions worldwide, the social upheaval that goes with it, the destroyed families and the direct and indirect deaths. Fuck your promo packet and fuck your cozy desk job.
Cry me a river
IP is not dying. It’s being consolidated to just a few mega corps. Good thing? Bad thing? Definitely the start of something big though.
Imaginary Property was always an illusion, one which is now crumbling quickly despite a lot of desperate attempts at maintaining it.
Everything was, is, and always will be a derivative work.
Wow. Maybe AI can win artists over after all.
great work, congratz.
The AI labs already figured it out:
1) reverse engineer the code 2) train a model on the code 3) use the model to write the clean code
Step 2 is the key “cleaning” process
So maybe a good strategy would be to use something like REA, put it on GitHub, wait for the LLMs to train on it, then just use the frontier models
/s
I prefer the word *laundering
LLM's have already trained on similar enough code
Even better, 1 and 2 done, just move to 3 and profit
Probably not, there's relatively little secret sauce to something like Photoshop. It's just a lot of grungy work that, I guess, you can now delegate to an agent if you have enough money and time.
As an aside, I've heard a lot of hot takes about how this is the end of Adobe, but I'm pretty sure it misses the point. The main reason people pay Adobe is because it's a familiar line of stable, well-supported, interoperable, and actively-developed products. There's already plenty of cheaper or free alternatives (Davinci Resolve for video, Capture One / Darktable for raw, Affinity for photo editing and vector drawing, etc), and if Adobe survived that, I sincerely doubt they're going to lose pro customers to a vibecoded app where half the stuff is probably subtly broken or left as a TODO, and that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.
Not really. Someone using Adobe Suite of products cannot easily switch to Davinci Resolve or Dark Table.
These are NOT the same thing whereas this one particular suite of clone products is exactly menu by menu, keyboard shortcut by keyboard shortcut and feature by feature a pure clone of corresponding products to that extent that they even have a separate dashboard just to track feature parity: https://github.com/storytold/craft-repo-status-app
It is NOT there yet of course but it won't be there in a year? That's an absurd claim to make. I have checked the repos multiple times and every new release keeps fixing something that wasn't working before.
At some point Adobe will go after the clones, copyright their interfaces, close standards, patent stuff etc. The barrier for software used to be implementation effort, but now that it's out of the window, it will be more like other forms of IP (music, physical products, etc).
Do the have legal grounds? Much of their own algorithms would come from open academic papers I suppose?
> that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.
Longbets 1 week, haha.
We're working our asses off on this.
Most of the team are artists who use these tools actively and we want the replacements for ourselves. I'm a filmmaker, so you can imagine my frustration of being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee".
> being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee"
I’m curious how much is your LLM bill. I’m assuming the idea is that LLMs will maintain the software? I’d be surprised, given the token economy, that you’d have to pay less than those subscriptions to LLM providers.
I know a few creatives that would be fine with the insane adobe fees if they felt that the fee actually paid for anything to get better. Instead it’s just a new version and rate hike every year but the same paper cut bugs and broken UI still ship.
Crashes don’t get less frequent… etc.
These guys have a shot now.
Doesn’t answer my question, does it?
> Doesn’t answer my question, does it?
You can't compare _cost_ here; apples vs oranges. How much _value_ per unit money is what matters here.
Comparisons should be done against the status quo: ~$60/user/month to adobe for years at a time only to see the product get more bloated, less stable and any bugs/feature-requests you file go to /dev/null.
Value and cost are quantifiable in business, down to the time you put on something. Otherwise it’s just feelings and good vibes. No matter how you calculate the vibe coded model is more expensive for the user without charity.
The vibe coded one will be garbage if you don’t put careful consideration and effort into both developing and maintaining it. That’s all _cost_ that come on top of the exorbitant token price you’ve to pay in perpetuity.
Btw, this is not a defense of Adobe’s software. It’s just that what you’re promoting is even worse than theirs.
great question
The very notion that there is an "unsubscribe fee" multiplies the cost 1,000,000x. And not just for me - for everyone.
Please make this make sense with some napkin math. At the end of the day, you can’t do business based on feelings when you have to pay hard earned cash.
You're doing God's work. Keep it up! PhotoCraft is really cool, and the pace of stabilizing progress is incredible! Don't listen to people who dismiss your work without getting their hands on it.
> I'm a filmmaker, so you can imagine my frustration of being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee"
What's the 'unsubscribe fee'? Are you referring to choosing something like an annual plan instead of 'Monthly' and only getting 50% back if you cancel partway through?
As you said you're a filmmaker, if someone chooses to obtain the rights to your film for a longer period instead of a shorter period and then changes their mind halfway through, do you similarly give them 50% back?
From what I can see, Adobe prominently and clearly displays from the first public checkout page the differences between 'monthly' and 'annual' options?
> From what I can see, Adobe prominently and clearly displays from the first public checkout page the differences between 'monthly' and 'annual' options?
It does now, because the FTC sued in 2024 and Adobe then corrected this, while settling in March 2026
Have you guys done any talks or written any articles on how you are developing this software?
Scaling up to this kind of complexity even with AI is still a challenge, at least for me.
I am definitely interested in alternatives, but I am not interested in an alternative that isn't supported and maintained. Though I suppose at some point I can ask my own agents to support/maintain it?
No ethical qualms here but you guys should save your money and just use Gimp! It's already free, really capable, and comes from a good and pure place of making software for its own sake. That's the kind of thing that gets you users for decade, beyond any egui rust doo dads.
They are covering the entire Adobe suite, not just Photoshop.
I've been really inspired by it. Ever since that sort of joking project came out, "Malus," that would clean room reimplement GPL software under more permissive licensing, I've been chewing on doing the reverse for proprietary software. I've been calling it the Manfred Macx theory of disruption, for the character in Accelerando that would patent and then release to public domain profitable ideas before a megacorp could lock them down.
I've got my wedding coming up so haven't had the time I want to dedicate seriously to finding some proprietary things to disrupt, but I've had fun using this as an opportunity to play with subagent orchestration, open weight models, various harnesses, and local models, to see what happens if I let some LLMs churn on it. That resulted in a hodge podge researched list of potential targets: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity/issues
One thing that stands out is a lot of software kinda does already have a FOSS replacement, it's just not really how people want it to be. GIMP being the representative example. Photoshop people just don't like it, I'm sure for not entirely invalid grievances. However the maintainers of these kinds of tools are often strongly opposed to LLM involved contributions, again , often for not entirely invalid reasons on these incredibly complex projects.
So the long and short of it is that as powerful as LLMs are, we aren't quite where some of the doomsayers are saying we are, insomuch as proprietary software is dead. Even with reverse engineering we aren't there. There's genuine labor, time, and expertise moats around most of these programs.
Personally I'm shifting to trying to find niche abandoned software with no export flow. Even if I can only help out a couple hundred people, it sounds like a decent use of my time.
I built a from scratch rust RAW processing engine similar to the brains behind photoshop and lightroom - its much more powerful and its not even complete yet
yep. it is unexpectedly everywhere. like, overnight.
LLMs are excellent at generating something that looks good, not so great at generating something that actually is good. All of those look really slick, but apparently the functionality is all broken
lol :), you're wrong.