Free AI-Built Apps Challenge Big Tech's Pricey Software

As the AI development wave spreads, more users are turning to artificial intelligence tools to clone paid desktop and mobile applications into free versions — a shift that could reshape the traditional software landscape.

Last week, a Reddit user named Brandon Thomas shared a project called "ArtCraft" — essentially a free rebuild of Adobe Creative Suite, including programs such as Photoshop and Adobe PDF. The recreated services are named PhotoCraft and PdfCraft.

The original software package typically costs $779.99 a year if paid upfront, or $69.99 a month under an annual contract for individual users.

Earlier this week, ArtCraft followed up by releasing clones of the Microsoft Office suite. Like the Adobe package, ArtCraft announced WordCraft, DeckCraft and GridCraft, taking direct aim at Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The software engineer behind these packages works in the United States, but the programs are offered globally.

Who is Brandon Thomas and what did he do?

The Reddit user "u/ai_art_is_art," the figure behind ArtCraft, has been identified as Brandon Thomas, a software engineer working in Atlanta, in the United States.

According to Thomas, he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 AI platform along with the Rust programming language to reverse-engineer Adobe's creative toolkit. Announcing the project on Reddit, Thomas insisted this is not "a flash in the pan that will fade away."

"I'm not just someone who writes code on a whim. I'm an engineer with 15 years of industry experience, having written everything from payment systems with 99.9999% availability handling billions of dollars in daily transactions to robotics automation and advanced optics. I've used Rust deeply for about a decade and know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects," he said.

The phrase "six-nines payment rails" refers to online payment infrastructure achieving 99.9999% operational availability, while Rust is a programming language.

Thomas said he was fed up with being charged cancellation fees on software products and wanted others to be able to access them for free. On Hacker News, he wrote: "We're going to replace Google Search, we're going to make our own smartphones, we're going to build better infrastructure. We're going to eliminate ads and free the entire tech world from the chaos."

What is "vibe coding" and how widespread is it in app development?

Even though Thomas denies being merely "someone who writes code on a whim," the method he used still falls more or less within the "vibe coding" trend.

Vibe coding is a new term in software development referring to asking AI tools to generate code rather than writing it by hand. This allows even people without technical programming knowledge to describe their ideas to an AI tool and have it produce the product.

According to IBM, vibe coding is "a shift toward intent-based software development, where AI systems assist developers by generating code from natural language instructions." The term was coined by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, in February 2025. On X, he wrote that AI users can "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists."

Vibe coding has become more popular as AI has boomed and new apps have flooded Apple's App Store. According to The New York Times, market analysis and digital data platform Sensor Tower estimates the number of new apps doubled in the first half of this year, reaching roughly 560,000.

Are there copyright concerns?

A legal gray area currently surrounds recreating established software without infringing intellectual property rights. On Reddit, Thomas described his Adobe-like apps as "clean-room" replacements, meaning they were built from scratch based on public file format specifications rather than Adobe's proprietary source code.

However, little is still known about how much of the code Claude wrote and how much Thomas wrote, according to Technollama, the blog of Professor Andres Guadamuz, an intellectual property law lecturer at the University of Sussex. "We also don't know whether the claimed 'clean-room' process would hold up to scrutiny," he said.

Can AI-written code "kill" traditional software?

Possibly. The decline of traditional software is unlikely to make applications like Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft entirely obsolete, but it could make them far less profitable if free alternatives emerge.