Y’all Need To Calm Down
I need to tell y’all what happened on LinkedIn this week. A whole goddamn army of dudes in quarter-zips and fleece vests started posting screenshots of Adobe Creative Suite clones. All of these dudes were proclaiming “SaaS is dead. Everything is open source now.”
No, it’s not.
If you need engagement that bad, sure, you can do whatever you want to do, but objectively speaking, I think we learned the opposite this week. And the reason I know this is because if you had actually downloaded this app, opened it, and tried to use it, you would have discovered the exact same thing I discovered. This software is terrible.
In case you missed it: There’s a GitHub repo called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, sitting at about a bazillion stars. The concept of this GitHub repo to reverse engineer your product is pretty simple. You see another person’s application, and you point “reverse engineer anything” at it. Then it’ll examine exactly everything that’s happening, down to its binary, and then build you your own version of that app.
I’m not going to bullshit y’all. That’s a pretty cool idea. It’s cool in the same sense that a lock-picking set is cool. You can learn to pick locks and break into anybody’s house.
The problem is, breaking into people’s houses is illegal. And maybe y’all didn’t consider this, but IP protection is a very real thing. So yeah, you can technically do this and try, and when you do, I am sure that a phalanx of lawyers is going to make your life suck shit.
So now every dude who’s making content on LinkedIn is making the exact same post. “This dude prompted Claude and reverse-engineered all the Adobe products, and now it’s over for Adobe.” Is it over for Adobe, though? I downloaded it. This suite sucks.
It’s not over. It didn’t even start. These applications are bad at the very basic things that I do, not even complex tasks. Just scrubbing a timeline in Premiere is fucking impossible on this clone. It’s glitchy and slow, and the edits don’t work. If I want to apply a LUT, I can’t. This is really simple shit, and we haven’t even got into complex workflows yet. Also, it crashes a lot, which is bad when you’re trying to edit a video product.
So, let’s deep dive. What is this suite of AI slop apps?
ArtCraft is an open-source catalog of applications that started with a desktop AI image and video studio. Lately they rolled out a whole family of what they call Craft Apps. Thirteen of them. PhotoCraft (that’s your Photoshop). FilmCraft (Premiere). VectorCraft (Illustrator). EffectCraft (After Effects). Then WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft, CADCraft, and a few more. Apparently this dude looked at the entire productivity software industry and said, “Yeah, I’ll just do all of those.” It takes an insane amount of hubris to even begin this sort of journey.
Also, I really love this. Every single one of them is “rebuilt in pure Rust.” Okay. That’s like telling me your car has a turbo. That’s cool. Does the car work?
If you’re judging on pure marketing, this whole thing is brilliant. PhotoCraft is pitched as “the image editor you already know how to use.” FilmCraft promises professional editing rebuilt from scratch, with its own native codecs and no FFmpeg inside. It has its own decoders. Do a deep dive sometime on YouTube and watch video professionals lose their minds over codecs. I get it. You thought the plumbing was weird. But no one asked you to go and invent a new version of… water. That’s just a crazy choice.
The thing is, at least someone maintaining this Git repo knows it’s not fully baked. They’re listing these applications as 0.6.0 and 0.7.0 — so they know it’s not ready for prime time. That’s not exactly a “SaaS Killer” as much as a “SaaS hobby project” — because these (as of this writing) 20 contributors are trying to brute force 13 (THIRTEEN!) different pieces of software.
Also, the people at Adobe? They have Claude, too. They can ship features just like everyone else.
I am not here to test software. I need video editing software that works.
Here is my use case. I have about 270,000 followers on TikTok. I’m not proud of this. I make TikToks. I’m an almost 40 year old dad with a weird hobby. But also, this hobby makes me money. That’s part of how I eat. When I sit down to edit, I’m not “exploring a new video editing open source paradigm in Rust.” I got footage, I got a deadline, and I got an algorithm to feed.
So I opened FilmCraft, on both Mac and Linux. (Reminder, Adobe doesn’t work on Linux.) And it LOOKS like Premiere. Monitors where the monitors go. Timeline where the timeline goes. Panels in all the right places. It’s dressed up like Premiere the way a nine-year-old is dressed up like Batman on Halloween. Cute costume. Do not call that child when the city is in trouble. I need real Batman.
Then I tried to actually edit something. Man. C’mon. Calling it a 70% project would be charitable. It works reliably maybe 10-15% of the time. That’s not even acceptable as a major league batting average. Shaq shot about 53% from the line for his career and people roasted him for twenty years. This thing is shooting 15% and LinkedIn thought leaders are trying to pretend this thing “broke SaaS forever” — when this thing broke… itself.
Same story with PhotoCraft. The marketing says I already know how to use it. And I do! I know exactly how to use it. It just doesn’t know how to work. The creators brag that 134 of 135 real-world test files round-trip perfectly. Congratulations. I don’t make test files. I make real content.
This is AI slop to the max. It’s a nine year old in a Batman costume. This is not the real Batman. This is a child’s fun little Halloween costume. I need Batman.
Before Anybody Gets It Twisted: Adobe Can Still Suck It
Let me give myself a little breathing room here because I don’t want anyone accusing me of being an Adobe shill. I am not on Adobe’s side. Adobe can suck the world’s biggest dick. I don’t want to pay those people a hundred dollars a month to move pictures around. And the cancellation fee? What kind of fucking software company has a cancellation fee?
But now I have to say the thing that nobody really wants to admit: Adobe sucks, but Adobe only sucks at the money side. The Adobe Creative Suite itself is really fucking good. It is polished software that professionals can count on working.
You can hate your ex because she threw a toaster at your head after an argument about the Roku remote… and still admit she could cook. Those are two separate facts. You can be mad about the business model, the fees, and the predatory nonsense, and you can also open Premiere and watch it just work. Both statements are true. Adobe sucks because they’re predatory vampires, but that vampire has excellent tits.
The Details Are Why Adobe Has Marketshare
Photoshop came out in 1990. Premiere came out in 1991. That’s 35 years of product development.
Adobe employs thousands of engineers, and the vast majority of them own some small part of some little feature. Their job is to nail that one little thing. That’s it.
One guy owns how the playhead snaps. One woman owns what audio sounds like when you scrub it. Somebody’s whole career is making sure “undo” works when you’re trying to quickly scrap the stupid editorial choice you made. Adobe has mature agile teams, and they ship tight features over and over. Every release sands down an already smooth product. Any blemish is quickly removed. You’re paying for a level of polish that is required for actual, professional tools.
Because that’s what you’re paying for. These are precision tools, in the same way a CNC machine is a precision tool.
Claude Code with Opus 5.5 gets the macro stuff right. I’ll note the layout, the menu names, the general shape of the thing… looks like what Adobe makes. What it misses is the feel. And the feel is the product. A coding agent can draw you a perfect regulation basketball court, with every line in the right spot. But a coding agent can’t play coordinated basketball, and know how to execute horns, or a double drag. That takes feel, and knowing the game.
Also, here’s what really kills the idea of a “SaaS killer” product: A large language model cannot QA like a person doing a real creative workflow. A model can write tests all goddamn day. It can’t know that you’re scrubbing your video, doing fast edits and cuts, trying to apply lower thirds, and how those sound effects on a different channel need to route in. That feeling is “sorta QA”. That’s the job of a TikToker. Thousands of Adobe engineers have been doing this thing for three decades, making sure all the clicks just work. You don’t just prompt your way into polished software.
So what did we learn here?
Whatever I just used… is not the death of SaaS. If you download this stuff and use it, it’s the opposite. This open source shit is genuinely awful.
What we’ve proven is the same thing every single Chinese knockoff factory learned in the 1990s. I can make you a think that looks sort of like a Rolex and sell it to you for $50. It’s accurate to within 30 minutes a day. It’s a ROLLEX. On the back of the case there’s a Juggalo logo.
Now, is this a moment of reckoning for SaaS? Yeah, it is. It’s just not the way thought-bros want to frame it up on LinkedIn. The reckoning is simply the shitty business model. The software is amazing, and that’s why people are trying to copy it, clone it, and give people alternatives. What we learned here is that people hate Adobe so much, they’ll willingly risk their lives to go heads-up with every Adobe lawyer, and literally lose all their money in the resulting civil lawsuit. I’d be terrified to even put my name on a PR for that repo. I don’t want that smoke. I just want Adobe to stop acting like dicks with their pricing.