One person rebuilt Adobe's apps. They are rough, and that is not the point.

In early October 2026 a software engineer named Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft: free, open-source stand-ins for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Lightroom, written mostly by an AI model, Claude Opus 5.5, in a language called Rust. He got tired of the subscription. The apps are early alpha and, by every account, glitchy. Nobody is cutting a film in FilmCraft this month.

Here is what matters if you run a small business. The hard part of software used to be writing it. One person just produced a first pass at four of the most complex desktop apps in the world by describing what he wanted and checking the result. In August, a developer named Chris Lewis turned all 2,145 functions of a Nintendo 64 game from the late nineties back into readable source in 84 days, using AI coding agents and three human experts for the parts the agents could not crack. His earlier project on the sequel, done mostly by hand, took 596 days.

Neither of those people is you, and you do not need to rebuild Photoshop. You need the contract that writes itself from the first call. The call sheet that goes out without you. The website that keeps adding pages while you work. Each of those is smaller than Photoshop by a mile, and the tools are the same ones.

The old advice to a small business was simple: never build, always buy. The cost of building just fell through the floor, and the people proving it are not companies. They are individuals who got tired of paying.

Stop buying. Start building. That is what we teach.