Perhaps a vibe-coded Adobe suite was inevitable.
https://tedium.co/2026/10/08/artcraft-vibe-coding-creative-cloud-remake/
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@ernie nice, thanks.
Boosted in the official subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtCraftAI/comments/1x2bf39/what_artcrafts_vibecoded_apps_say_about_adobe/
@ernie i think it's a shame dev resources and LLM tokens are going into making "exactly excel" while projects like https://github.com/ironcalc/ironcalc remain in need of maintainers. the very reason Google sheets was so remarkable when it arrived was that it was /not/ like excel. you could run it in your browser effortlessly, and it came with none of the horrid latency and scaling limits of excel. it's fine enough that such a project is made, but it would be much better use of everyone's time if they extended existing OSS projects to have features existing Excel / Adobe users want. using decomp or RE or whatever.
@draconacht I can go for that. I think the Adobe suite makes more sense than deconstructing the Office suite in part because people have not had a lot of specific alternatives, which has put them into predatory subscriptions because they need the specific tools. There isn't really much directly comparable to After Effects for example, and InDesign has been a de facto standard for 25 years. They're stuck with formats, simply put.
But Excel? Dozens of alternatives out there already.
@draconacht I think the best case scenario is that certain innovations put forth by this software will end up proving useful inspiration for other programs, who can take parts that have previously been hard to nail down. A clean room INDD interpreter could be hugely useful to say, Scribus, for example.
@ernie As you are a creative person who asks to be paid for their work, I was not expecting a “stealing is okay because I don’t like Adobe” vibe. In the post, you ask if this is legal, but I think we all agree decompiling (vs. reimplementing, say) is clearly illegal. Whereas Adobe charging high prices and having disagreeable policies is clearly not illegal. I worry about a future in which nobody gets recognized or paid for their work. Thanks for the thought-provoking post!
@DavidAnson my point, to be clear, was not intended to be pro-stealing, but rather to come out in favor of the the ground up approach that fostered it.
When I wrote what I wrote, I was thinking in terms of BIOSes and similar approaches to reverse engineering.
@ernie OK, this is really interesting! The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on reverse engineering emphasizes the use of “deductive reasoning”, which is similar to my stance which precludes the approach taken above. HOWEVER, the section “Binary software” includes a reference to BIOS (as you cite!) as well as referencing decompilation specifically, which I think is more representative of your stance. It seems the definition is not so clear as I thought. :(
“There are real reasons to cheer on something like this, even if you otherwise hate AI. The spirit of this evokes a Robin Hood-like mindset, in that it exists because of real ethical and economic issues around Adobe that many end users have long been stuck with.”
https://tedium.co/2026/10/08/artcraft-vibe-coding-creative-cloud-remake/