ArtCraft's AI-built PhotoCraft hits 1.7 million downloads per day

ArtCraft's pitch is built on a story about the web's drift from open experimentation to gatekept platforms. Thomas traced that shift to Web 2.0, arguing that the APIs and freedom of the early web gave way to distribution controlled by big providers. His frustration with Adobe is personal — he described an unexpected fee when cancelling a monthly plan — and it became the seed for a company whose ethos is to "build everything open source." That message, he said, has resonated even with people skeptical of AI.

The development method is as notable as the products. Thomas said the team gave an AI model a detailed prompt outlining Photoshop's tools, data structures and file importers, then a larger prompt to build the application; within 24 hours they had what he called a pretty good approximation of Photoshop. PhotoCraft is still short of full parity, but the team aims to match Adobe's interface and "look and feel" to fit artists' muscle memory before building more agentic apps. Rust was essential to performance, he said, and agents do much of the work — though humans still handle backend work, schema migrations and API design.

The response has surprised Thomas: the New York Times requested an interview, the open source community grew to about 4,000 developers, and downloads are still accelerating. Technical problems remain — CI, permissions and scaling among them — and ArtCraft has been spinning up its own infrastructure. The bigger question is whether agent-driven development can sustain a community at the scale the early web achieved, with agents now doing the bulk of the work.