Brandon Thomas had spent 15 years writing software and a decade of that in Rust when he decided he had paid Adobe enough. At the start of the month he released seven free open-source applications under his ArtCraft banner, modelled on Creative Cloud, with PhotoCraft standing in for Photoshop, FilmCraft for Premiere Pro and EffectCraft for After Effects. He built them in a couple of weeks with Claude Opus 5.5, announced that "software is over", and watched PhotoCraft alone pass 43,000 GitHub stars in under a fortnight. Reviewers who tried the alpha found gaps in colour handling and professional workflows, but the timing helped. Adobe agreed in March to a $150 million settlement of a federal case over hidden early termination fees and hard-to-cancel subscriptions, and the resentment behind it had been waiting for a tool.
Some have started calling this "spite SaaS". A user gets one too many upsell pop-ups or spends an evening with a chatbot that cannot cancel their plan, describes the 5% of the product they actually use to a frontier model, and has a working replacement two hours later. You can see the same capability applied for sheer fun in the screenshot from modder 0xProbability, where Minecraft's blocky character stands outside a Los Santos petrol station in GTA 5 with a full crafting inventory bar along the bottom of the screen. The modder had Opus 5.5 write and test the mod that brings the two worlds together, showing how closed commercial titles are now being treated as raw material that anyone can pull apart and remix.
Beneath these stories sits a change in tooling and a reflection of how capable the latest models have become at software engineering. The number one trending repository on GitHub this week is REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, now past 285,000 stars. See a feature in an app you want in your own product, ask your agent to investigate, and it will explain how it works, show the evidence and help you build your own version. One showcase traces Notion's clipboard bridge through its renderer, preload and main processes.
The utility is considerable. Any organisation sitting on undocumented legacy binaries can extract the business logic and rebuild it on a modern stack, and product teams can study how a rival handles a workflow before designing something better. Vendors face a different calculation, since compiled code only protected them because reading it was slow, and bundles only held because customers could not build the slice they needed. Both assumptions have now failed.
But REA's own README warns that lookalike repositories are not official, and one has already been caught serving malware, and a vibe-coded clone of a trusted tool can look identical whilst missing input validation or quietly mishandling files. An agent could edit local game assets to render opponents through walls, bypassing anti-cheat systems that only watch for injected code. When any client-side binary can be unpacked, altered and rebuilt at home, vendors can no longer assume the software running on a customer's machine is the software they shipped.
Takeaways: Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra, paired with harnesses like REA, have turned every compiled program into readable, editable source material, and ArtCraft is the first widely noticed result rather than the last. Legacy systems become recoverable and competitor features become study material, while pricing power, lock-in and client-side trust all weaken. The sensible response is to treat your own software as if it were already open, and compete on service and data rather than secrecy.