Inspired by “Crafting Apps: thirteen open-source creative tools, built in Rust” (ArtCraft).
Every year or so, someone announces they’re going to replace Adobe with open source, and every year the announcement ages like milk. GIMP still opens with a dialogue about its old name, Krita is genuinely great if you paint, Inkscape’s exporters still fight you — and the suite-of-misfits problem never goes away: each app has its own shortcuts, its own file habits, its own ideas about what a toolbar is. So when a project called ArtCraft says it’s building thirteen creative apps from scratch — image editor, vector illustration, video editing, raw photo development, PDF workbench, motion graphics, page layout, interface design, word processing, audio workstation, presentations, CAD and spreadsheets — my first reaction was healthy scepticism.
My second reaction was that they’re not attacking the problem the way everyone else has, and the difference matters even if you never install a single one of these apps.
One stack, one language, no Electron
All thirteen apps are being written from scratch in Rust, compiled to native desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux — no Electron, no web views, no Chromium instances wearing an app costume. Each app also compiles to WebAssembly and runs in a browser tab, which sounds like a party trick until you remember what it means for deployment: the same codebase behind your desk and in a browser, with no porting layer between them.
The stated rules are consistent across the lineup: open source under permissive licences with the code on GitHub, files that stay on your machine (no cloud round-trip between you and your work), and layouts familiar to professionals who already know the incumbent tools. There’s a launcher that installs and updates the whole set, the way a package manager should have been doing this for a decade.
The sceptic’s caveat, stated plainly: most of the lineup is labelled “in development”, and the rest “early alpha”. Nobody should be cancelling an Adobe subscription over this today. Video editing, DAW work and CAD are famously brutal categories where the incumbents have decades of edge-case scar tissue. A from-scratch video editor is a five-year problem even when it’s the only thing you’re building.
The part that’s actually new
Here’s the line in their principles that made me stop scrolling: agent-ready. Every app is drivable from a CLI, a JSON control channel, or an MCP server — built for automation and AI agents from day one, not bolted on later.
Think about what that means in practice. A PDF tool you can drive from a script means “split these 40 invoices, stamp each with its filename, move them to the client folder” is a one-liner in your agent’s tool belt — no UI automation, no screenshot-driven hacks, no hoping the desktop app doesn’t steal focus mid-job. An image editor with a JSON control channel means batch-resizing, watermarking and exporting become part of a pipeline instead of a Tuesday morning of clicking. The MCP support means an agent you already run — the one that lives in your homelab and handles the boring chores — can operate these apps like it operates your file system.
This is the inversion worth paying attention to. The old open-source pitch was “same experience, zero dollars”, and it lost because the experience was never quite the same. The pitch hiding inside ArtCraft is different: software you can program beats software you can click, and the creative apps are the last major category where nobody’s seriously tried it. Commercial vendors won’t do this — scriptable creative apps cannibalise the seat licences that fund them. An open-source suite has no such conflict.
What a small shop should actually do
- Don’t migrate anything. It’s alpha software. Your production files deserve better.
- Pilot the utilities, not the exotic stuff. A PDF workbench and an image editor are low-stakes, high-frequency tools where an alpha is genuinely usable and an agent hook pays for itself immediately. A from-scratch DAW is not that.
- Watch the file formats, not the feature lists. The suites that die, die on compatibility. If these apps read and write the incumbent formats honestly (PSD, RAW, PDF/A, SVG, XLSX), they have a path. If they champion a new format first, they don’t.
- Steal the architecture even if you ignore the apps. If you build internal tools, “every app ships with a CLI, a JSON channel and an MCP server” is a principle you can adopt on Monday. Your future automation stack will thank you.
The bet, framed honestly
Thirteen simultaneous from-scratch rewrites is either monumentally ambitious or monumentally naive, and at alpha stage you can’t tell which from the outside. But the goalposts have moved. Five years ago, an open-source creative suite needed to win a beauty contest against polished commercial tools, and that was a losing game. Today it needs to be good enough to click and perfect to script — because the thing doing the scripting didn’t exist when the incumbents were designed.
That’s the shift worth tracking. The version of this story where it succeeds isn’t “free Photoshop”. It’s “an agent that lives on your NAS quietly processes every asset that touches your business, and the human only opens an app for the decisions that need taste.” Watch the launcher’s update notes, pilot a utility or two, and keep your files portable in the meantime.