October 10, 2026 · one post at a time

Claude Just Cloned Adobe's Entire Suite

Hey friends!! Nick and Jack over at Stacked dropped an episode this week that honestly feels like a line in the sand :)

Someone rebuilt Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5 and released the whole thing as open source. Let me say that again: the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Cloned. Open source. Free.

Here is what that means for people who run businesses, not just design shops.

1. The subscription trap is cracking. Adobe charges $20 to $40 a month per app. Most people pay $50 to $100 a month minimum. This open source suite replaces all of it with a one-time token cost or whatever AI plan you already have.
2. Wikipedia already proved this model. Paid encyclopedia with experts versus free Wikipedia built by volunteers. Wikipedia won so big the paid one shut down. Same dynamic is hitting software now.
3. It is not piracy. The builders did not steal Adobe source code. They rebuilt from scratch explaining the logic to Opus 5.5. Different path, same destination. That matters legally.
4. Hotkeys work the same. Layouts are identical. Tool pickers match. The UX is virtually indistinguishable. Nick literally could not tell the difference when Jack screen-shared it.
5. Open source compounds. Adobe had maybe 100 developers. Now there are 100,000 people with AI looking at this code. It will get better faster than any corporate team can match.
6. Businesses paying thousands a month in SaaS subscriptions — this is your exit door. Identify every tool you pay for. Prompt Opus once per tool. Build your own stack. Cancel the subscriptions.

Feel free to start with the one tool that hurts your wallet most :) The rest follows naturally.

Let's goooooo. - Doug