A developer named Brandon Thomas rebuilt seven Adobe Creative Cloud apps in Rust under the name Artcraft, open-sourced them, and made them run on Linux too. Fireship tried the Premiere clone (FilmCraft) to edit this very video and found it laggy and visually inferior, but says the real story is a separate viral tool, Reverse Engineer Anything (REA), which wraps Ghidra and AI agents to decompile stripped binaries, JVM bytecode, .NET assemblies, firmware, and container layers into readable pseudocode. The practical workflow is: decompile the one feature you want, hand the garbage pseudocode to a coding agent, and have it reimplement the feature in Rust so you can build a stripped-down clone of any paid app.
- Brandon Thomas, after being hit with Adobe's cancellation fee more than once, used AI coding tools to reverse engineer Adobe's 30-plus-year codebase and ship seven Rust rewrites as the open source Artcraft project, including Linux builds Adobe never officially supported.
- Actually using the Premiere clone (FilmCraft) exposed the limits: audio bar lag and general slowness after dropping a single clip on the timeline, and transitions visibly worse than Premiere's side by side, despite being written in 'blazingly fast' Rust.
- The video points out that an open source alternative to Premiere already existed for decades in DaVinci Resolve, undercutting the novelty of the Adobe clones.
- Reverse Engineer Anything can decompile stripped ELF/PE/Mach-O executables, obfuscated JVM bytecode, .NET assemblies, bare-metal firmware, and OCI container layers, which effectively makes shipped software readable whether or not the vendor wants it.
- Setup is trivial: run REA with Node.js via npx, then configure the Ghidra integration, which does read-only analysis of native EXEs and DLLs and is credited as doing the real work.
- The output is C-like pseudocode plus assembly, strings, symbols, calls, and references useless to a web developer on its own, so the actual move is to pass that output to a coding agent and have it reimplement the feature from scratch.
- The same technique applied to SaaS: REA's networking feature was used to analyze Supabase's API interactions and UI changes to build a custom, cheaper backend clone with only the needed features.
- The stated goal is 'Premiere Lite' a personal build that keeps only the handful of features you use and drops the hundreds that get in the way.
The hands-on verdict that punctures the headline claim that one developer made the Adobe suite obsolete overnight.
The cracks became visible immediately, like after dragging a clip of some lame stock video onto the timeline and hitting play, there was a massive lag in the audio bars, and just overall slowness and lagginess despite being vibe-coded in Rust, which I've been told is a blazingly fast programming language.
This is the concrete method behind the whole premise: Ghidra output as input to an AI agent to clone a single feature you actually want.
A while later, we get back a bunch of C-like pseudocode, along with assembly, strings, symbols, calls, and references... However, we can now take this garbage code and pass it off to our favorite coding agent to re-implement the exact same feature in Rust.
In layman's terms, that means virtually every app in the world is now open source, whether it wants to be or not.
The software is a nearly unusable pile of vibe-coded horseshit.
I think it's crazy that any real vibe developer in 2026 is still paying money for developer tools, when that money should be spent burning tokens.