ArtCraft: Desktop Apps Built with AI, Useful Results, and Open Questions

There is a particular kind of software announcement I normally scroll past: somebody has rebuilt a large, mature application with AI, the screenshots look convincing, and apparently an entire industry is now over. Somewhere below the announcement, a user discovers that Save does not save. ArtCraft’s Crafting Apps initially looked like they might belong in that category. The project describes attempts to rebuild the workflows of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects, and then Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Rust with AI coding agents. An ambitious afternoon, if nothing else. Then I tried several of them. They are unfinished. They also worked considerably better than I expected. PhotoCraft let me apply fairly complex filters to selected areas of an image, and it was perfectly usable for editing some video thumbnails. The applications started in roughly one or two seconds on my fairly average machine and felt remarkably snappy. Then I noticed the FreeBSD…