What comes next could reshape the future of software development, and perhaps the creative industry as a whole.
Here’s something weird. It doesn’t matter how much or how little we earn. Many of us, when it comes to renewing our Creative Cloud subscription, look at the annual price and feel angry, used and ripped off. Even though, if you think about it, it’s a fraction of the cost of what we pay for other things we use for work: the Apple Mac, the iPhone, the desk and chair, even the coffee that keeps us going. (Believe me: add up the cost of years’ worth of flat whites and your eyes will start to water.)
So why do we feel “ripped off”, exactly? For older people like me, I think, it’s partly because we compare it to how much we paid for, say, Photoshop, when it was just a standalone disc that we paid for once, and kept using for years. Younger people, though, won’t remember that, and yet in my experience, they still bristle at the cost.
I think that’s largely because, on some level, all of us are happier paying for physical things than things that are essentially invisible, whether that’s software, games or music. It may not make logical sense, but for some reason when we can hold a tangible thing in our hands, we can feel the value. When we can’t, that value feels much more distant and unreal.
Do consumers feel loved?
The lesson for software providers, to my mind, is that they should fall over themselves to provide excellent service, develop strong relationships with their customers, and ultimately aim to feel loved. Unfortunately, Adobe doesn’t always manage this in practice.
Case in point: developer Brandon Thomas tried to cancel an Adobe subscription and was hit with an early termination fee. He didn’t take this well. And what he did next may make the $92bn company ultimately regret not having more flexible cancellation policies.
Last week, Brandon launched a suite of seven free, open-source apps under the ArtCraft brand. In simple terms, they recreate the look and tools of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. He built them with Anthropic’s AI model Claude Opus 5.5, and by the look of the screenshots, they are as close to the real thing as you can imagine.
For some, it might seem like a quirky little story of no real importance. Those of us who remember the launch of Napster, though, might be thinking: this is going to change everything.
What was Napster?
For those who weren’t around at the time, here’s a brief recap. In 1999, a service launched on this new thing called the internet that let anyone download music for free. Pirated music had existed for decades, of course, but it was generally shonky quality. Napster offered CD-quality sound without having to pay £15 for a CD, which was a lot of money in those days. (For comparison, you could buy a flat in London for about £30,000.)
Napster was totally illegal and got shut down within two years. But the damage was done. Millions had filled their computers and hard drives with all the free music they could ever wish for, Napster clones sprang up across the web, and the record industry’s business model never recovered.
ArtCraft feels like the same thing. And Brandon certainly thinks so. “Software is over,” he proclaims on YCombinator. “But for real. I just one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing. My construction contractor neighbour created an elder care app and has users. No experience in software. Our career is worthless soon.”
A brave new world?
Brandon’s bravado is worth quoting at length. Elsewhere on YCombinator he writes: “AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-shitty era. But now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you. We’ll replace Google Search; we’ll build our own smartphones; we’ll build better infra. We’ll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.
“Big tech sowed the seeds of their own commodification with AI. It’s all going to come down to this now that we can rebuild everything without toiling for years to even get close to scaling software capability moats. The internet is going to reset to 1990-2004 (pre-Facebook / “Web 2.0″ era). The indie web era. Everything is going to be reborn as open source. We’re going to own it all.”
The swagger is immense, but there is a serious point underneath all the excitement. As a profession, we’ve become used to the idea that developing creative software requires thousands of highly paid programmers and decades of work. That serves as a moat for a company like Adobe: few others can afford to build anything on the scale of the Creative Cloud. But will AI bring all that crashing down around them?
Honestly, I have no idea. But Brandon is excited. He thinks it all heralds a thrilling new future. Maybe he’s right.
Call me an old git, though, but I remember a pre-Napster world when my favourite bands could earn a decent living off the back of £15 CDs. Nowadays my favourite bands, even those who play on big festival stages, often have full-time jobs to support their art. Are software developers and digital creatives facing a similar future?
