Software Costs Millions to Make but Claude Cracked It in Seconds. (Pt - 1)

AI reverse engineering just produced an open source Photoshop alternative, PhotoCraft, built in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5 doing the coding, and it works because Photoshop graded every answer. PhotoCraft (storytold/photocraft on GitHub) is a clean-room Photoshop clone written in pure Rust, and the first of seven free ArtCraft apps aimed at Adobe Creative Cloud. Its README says the trick out loud: a composite oracle compares every PhotoCraft render with Photoshop's own merged image. 307 of 309 psd-tools test files round-trip, 116 of 116 shape layers match Photoshop's pixels, and more than 1,700 tests guard the rest. Every menu item is one of 500+ commands shared by the UI, the CLI and an MCP server, so Claude Code or any other agent can drive the editor. That's how you reverse engineer Photoshop without its source code, and it's the pattern behind the whole AI reverse engineering wave. Super Smash Bros. Melee hit 100% matching decompilation after six years of human groundwork, because a compiler either reproduces the original bytes or it doesn't. Modern Warfare 2 had no such check: four Claude agents burned 235 billion tokens, $85,207 at API prices on a $200 Claude Max plan, and the game still couldn't run its scripts. GPT-6 Astra's 99.2% on SRE-Bench is a within-four-attempts score on 19 in-house programs; the paper's own run of GPT-5.6 Sol fully solved 31.5%. So where did the AI software clone moat go? To whatever can't run on your machine. PhotoCraft's own list of gaps is AI/generative features, about twenty tools, typography depth and plug-in compatibility, and Adobe's Generative Fill runs on Adobe's servers. CAN YOU CANCEL YOUR ADOBE SUBSCRIPTION YET? Not for daily professional work, by PhotoCraft's own README, which calls it early alpha. If you want a free Adobe alternative to watch, the ArtCraft set covers seven Adobe CC alternatives, all open source under MIT or Apache-2.0: - PhotoCraft: Photoshop alternative - VectorCraft: Illustrator alternative - FilmCraft: Premiere alternative - LightCraft: Lightroom alternative - EffectCraft: After Effects alternative - DesignCraft: InDesign alternative - PrintCraft: Adobe Acrobat alternative There's no Adobe Animate alternative in the set. For Adobe alternatives on Linux, check each repo's releases before you plan a switch around it. WHAT THIS VIDEO COVERS - How PhotoCraft used psd-tools files and a Photoshop composite oracle as its answer key - Why you can reverse engineer Photoshop's output but not Adobe's servers - Why Melee's decompilation finished and Modern Warfare 2's mostly didn't, with the same kind of tools - What GPT-6 Astra's 99.2% on SRE-Bench actually measured - The 426x gap between list-price tokens and a $200 Claude Max plan - Who should genuinely worry: anyone who ships the whole product to the customer's machine CHAPTERS 00:00 $85,207 of tokens, no playable map 00:36 Why it looks like everything's open 01:27 99.2% within four tries: the footnote 02:30 What a compiler throws away 03:41 Guess and check: the answer key 05:25 Melee: six years of answer key 06:13 PhotoCraft grades itself against Photoshop 07:18 Modern Warfare 2 had no grader 08:21 426 times: the subsidy under the demos 09:00 A crash is an answer key too 10:38 Where nothing can grade the guess 11:57 The moat moved to the server 13:03 Who should genuinely worry about this 14:15 Ask what it was graded against SOURCES PhotoCraft: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft ArtCraft apps: https://github.com/storytold ArtCraft launch post (Opus 5.5): https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1wwnhbt/ Generative Fill runs on Adobe's servers: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/do-i-need-internet-connection-to-use-generative-fill-on-photoshop/m-p/14419206 GPT-6 Astra figures: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/3/gpt6-astra/ SRE-Bench paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11469 Vals SRE Bench: https://www.vals.ai/comparisons/anthropic_claude-opus-5-5-vs-openai_gpt-5.6-sol MirrorCode: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30182 Matching decompilation test: https://gambiconf.substack.com/p/can-llms-really-do-matching-decompilation Melee 100%: https://heldgames.com/guides/melee-decompiled-ai-astra MW2 agents: https://web.archive.org/web/20260925153118/https://momo5502.com/posts/2026-08-17-mw2-decompilation/ MW2 audit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260925153131/https://momo5502.com/posts/2026-08-22-mw2-decompilation-audit/ FFmpeg and curl bug economics: https://labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/csa-research-note-ai-autonomous-vuln-discovery-economics-202/ TheFlow and the PS5 bug: https://kotaku.com/popular-playstation-hacker-calling-it-quits-due-to-ai-using-slop-kiddies-reporting-important-bug-to-sony-2000735105