An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop in pure Rust
20 points by jussi
20 points by jussi
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 noreply@anthropic.com
Not so "clean-room", eh?
Yeah. I somewhat doubt any human has read the source code. I wonder what effect LLMs are to capitalism, when actors can reimplement things with LLMs in this manner? Adobe has pushed LLMs a lot, I guess it works the other way too. Stare in to the abyss and it stares back etc.
But interesting to see how the industry reacts to these, as someone has reverse engineered all Adobe's products using these new tools.
My big fear is that we'll get laws and terms and conditions that protect the big guys, while the big guys will continue to ravage the little guys in exactly the same way.
"Of course you can't do that to Photoshop, it's Adobe's IP and they've told you that you can't!"
versus
"Of course Adobe can have an LLM use your GPL codebase when improving Photoshop, it's open source and they're not copying your code just looking at it so the GPL doesn't infect!"
There's still time to fight, but I'm exhausted, and the fact that a huge portion of the FOSS community is embracing the direction of travel – either by claiming my fear won't come to be, or that it'll be good when it does – is making it even more demotivating.
We already have this. This is how copyright works in practice.
Company steals your code, you sue, they bury you in legal fees, you go bankrupt.
You steal company's code, they sue, you go bankrupt.
(And I stole the above, seen it cross my fedi feed, was good, I borrowed it.)
What you're describing here is a general deficiency of our legal systems in general. It's not specific to intellectual property. What I sketch is a novel problem with the laws themselves.
Both are bad. They're not the same.
The practical effect is pretty much the same, though. Laws always protect the big guys. Even if we make good laws, big guys will always be able to game the system.
Besides, AI companies already use the "fair use" excuse. In jurisdictions where that exists, that law you envision already exists.
Want to bet that no leak of Adobe source code ended up in the training set? I'd be fascinated to see Adobe do an audit and see how much is just a straight translation from C to Rust of some of the actual Photoshop code.
I bet this will lead into interesting court cases.
I was thinking they mean might mean something like this by the "clean room": https://shiftmag.dev/license-laundering-and-the-death-of-clean-room-8528/
There was also AutoCAD, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word clones on GitHub.
They don't need to audit - that's expensive. It is cheaper to cease & desist, or bury the "reimplementer" in legal fees.
Yeah, I'm not anti-LLM, but I don't really consider any project clean room if one is used in a significant capacity. I think to qualify the bar is higher than even a lot of FOSS projects that have anti-AI contribution policies. Just asking an LLM questions stack overflow style could pose a risk.
Since this is Rust I went looking for a WebAssembly build. They have one, but weirdly they expect you to download a zip file and then serve it via localhost yourself in order to try it out.
So I uploaded that zip file to my S3 bucket and now you can try it here: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/photocraft-web-0.2.0/ (loads a 27.1MB WASM file)
I'm baffled as to why they don't offer the hosted version themselves somewhere obvious!
It's humorous to me that they present all these images of the UI to show off and every single one looks sloppy. Welcome to the future of software!