ArtCraft founder refuses to use REA, while the team insists on recreating commercial software using a clean-room approach

AT A GLANCE

ArtCraft rejects REA for reverse-engineering commercial software and chooses a clean-room approach to develop open-source alternatives, but their functionality remains incomplete.

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REA Is this the end of closed-source software? The person recreating the entire Adobe suite refuses to use it

Beating AI news flash, the reverse-engineering tool REA has recently gone viral, with developer Matthew Berman even declaring that “software is dead.” Yet Brandon Thomas, founder of ArtCraft, which is using AI to recreate the entire Adobe suite, has publicly stated that he will not use REA. He stressed on Hacker News that the team does not decompile commercial software and prohibits the use of reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra, fearing potential copyright litigation.

Thomas is using Claude Opus 5.5, along with Rust, to develop a series of free, open-source software programs. Of these, 7 projects are counterparts to Adobe products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Recently, he turned his attention to Microsoft, launching projects corresponding to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. However, these programs are still a long way from truly replacing the originals. Tests found that PhotoCraft cannot open the HEIC photos commonly used by iPhones, while FilmCraft has problems with some basic editing operations and audio playback.REA allows Claude Code and other Agent to call Ghidra,IDA and other tools to analyze software without publicly available source code and recreate functions based on the analysis. Thomas, however, insists on a different development approach: referring only to public technical documentation and the software’s actual behavior, writing the code from scratch, and avoiding the original implementation’s internal details. This approach is known as “clean-room” development.

He believes that REA may be acceptable for personal research or for studying abandoned software, but if it is used to decompile commercial software and publicly release imitations, litigation may result if the original software’s proprietary code is involved.

Original link https://m.theblockbeats.info/flash/371359

Key points

The report describes REA as a recently viral reverse-engineering tool, and developer Matthew Berman once said that “software is dead.”
ArtCraft founder Brandon Thomas publicly stated that he will not use REA, saying that the team does not decompile commercial software and prohibits the use of reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra.
Thomas is using Claude Opus 5.5, along with Rust, to develop a series of free, open-source software programs, including 7 projects corresponding to Adobe products.
The report says that the corresponding products include Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro, and that Thomas recently launched projects corresponding to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The report’s tests found that PhotoCraft cannot open HEIC photos, while some of FilmCraft’s basic editing operations and audio playback have problems.
REA can let Claude Code and other Agent call Ghidra,IDA and other tools to analyze software without publicly available source code and recreate functions based on the results.
Thomas says his development approach refers only to public technical documentation and the software’s actual behavior, writing code from scratch without accessing the original implementation’s internals; the report calls this “clean-room” development.
Thomas believes that REA may be acceptable for personal research or for studying abandoned software, but decompiling commercial software and publicly releasing imitations involving the original’s proprietary code may lead to litigation.

AI-assisted interpretation

The following is analysis, separate from reported facts. Verify important claims independently.

REA helps AI development agents call reverse-engineering tools to observe closed-source software and recreate its functions. Thomas is concerned that this approach may expose them to commercial software’s proprietary code, so he chooses to examine only public documentation and the software’s external behavior before writing the code himself. However, the alternative software discussed in the report still has problems with format compatibility, editing, and audio playback.

Why it matters to readers

This reflects AI two key issues when assisting in the development of open-source alternatives: whether the development process touches the proprietary implementation of commercial software, and whether the alternative already has sufficient compatibility and basic functionality.

Beginners can use this to distinguish reverse-engineering analysis from clean-room development, and should also note that “free and open-source” or “AI-assisted development” does not mean that the software can already replace mature commercial products.

Risks and unknowns

The evidence does not include Brandon Thomas’s original post on Hacker News, so its complete wording and context cannot be independently verified.
The evidence does not provide pages for the ArtCraft projects or the testing process, so the stated project count, functionality status, and test results still require verification.
Whether this constitutes copyright infringement, whether it will inevitably lead to litigation, and whether a clean-room approach can avoid legal disputes cannot be confirmed based on the available evidence.

ArtCraft founder refuses to use REA, while the team insists on recreating commercial software using a clean-room approach

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