Use an MCP server wired to decompilers so an AI agent can autonomously map decompiled code to proper variables and functions, dramatically speeding up static recompilation projects that previously took years of human work.
ArtCraft is a suite of thirteen native, open-source creative and productivity applications from the ArtCraft team, including PhotoCraft for image editing, VectorCraft for vector illustration, FilmCraft for video editing, LightCraft for photo libraries and raw development, PdfCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft, FigCraft, WordCraft, SoundCraft, DeckCraft, CADCraft and GridCraft. The applications are written from scratch in Rust and compiled as desktop software for macOS, Windows and Linux rather than being Electron or web-view wrappers. They run locally on users' files, and the suite provides a launcher that installs and updates the apps; several applications also compile to WebAssembly for browser use. Each app is open source under permissive licenses, and the suite exposes CLI, JSON control-channel and MCP-server interfaces for automation and AI agents.
Claude Opus is an AI model developed by Anthropic, the company behind the Claude assistant. It is part of the Claude family and is designed for complex language tasks, including research and content generation. The model is available through Anthropic's platform.
DaVinci Resolve is a professional video editing, color correction, visual effects, and audio post-production application developed by Blackmagic Design. It combines nonlinear editing, the DaVinci color grading tools, Fusion visual effects, and Fairlight audio tools in a single program. The software is available in a feature-limited free version and a paid Studio edition.
FFmpeg is a collection of libraries and command-line tools for processing multimedia content, including audio, video, subtitles, and related metadata. Its libraries provide codec implementations, streaming and container-format handling, filtering through directed graphs, device access, audio mixing and resampling, and image scaling and color conversion. The toolset includes ffmpeg for manipulating, converting, and streaming media, ffplay for playback, and ffprobe for inspecting media content. The codebase is mainly licensed under the LGPL, with optional components under the GPL. The repository is an official mirror of the FFmpeg project's Git repository; the project directs contributors to submit patches through its mailing list rather than GitHub pull requests.
FilmCraft is an open-source, non-linear video editor developed by the ArtCraft team and community as a clean-room reimplementation of the Adobe Premiere Pro workflow. It is written in pure Rust, with native applications for macOS, Windows and Linux and a WebAssembly version for browsers. The editor provides Premiere-like panels, workspaces, tools and shortcuts for editing, color, effects, audio, titles, captions, formats, export and interchange. Its engine uses integer-based time, a GPU compositor built on wgpu, linear-light compositing, a Rust DSP library, and native implementations of video, audio and container formats rather than bundling FFmpeg; FFmpeg is used externally for tests. It also exposes the same command system through the user interface, CLI, JSON control channel and MCP server, allowing agents to operate the editor. FilmCraft is in alpha. The project reports approximately 86% feature breadth relative to Premiere Pro and estimates that approximately 56% is ready for real work, while noting gaps including limited hardware acceleration, no direct Premiere project-file import, no plugin hosting and limited testing on real-world media. It is distributed for multiple desktop platforms, as a browser build, and under the MIT or Apache-2.0 license.
REA is a local reverse-engineering tool for AI agents, distributed as a CLI and MCP server. It connects agents to analysis providers such as Hopper and Ghidra, and can inspect native binaries, macOS applications, JavaScript and Electron applications, .NET assemblies, websites, packages, and controlled runtime behavior. Its investigation workflow decompiles or maps a target, follows strings, symbols, calls, references, and control flow, records evidence and limitations, and uses the findings to help reconstruct features in another project without claiming to recover original source code or automatically clone an application. Analysis runs on the local host; REA configures agent integrations and can optionally install Hopper, while Ghidra and Java must be installed separately. The project is distributed under the MIT license.
Wispr Flow is an AI voice-to-text dictation tool and notetaker from Wispr that uses speech recognition and contextual editing to convert natural speech into polished, formatted text across applications on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. It removes filler words, corrects repetitions and self-corrections, adds punctuation, and formats spoken input for writing, messaging, coding, creating prompts, and interacting with desktop applications. Wispr Flow Notetaker is available on Windows and Mac.
Searchable transcript of the AI Situation Is Crazy — TechHut (11:26). Search for a phrase, then click its timestamp to jump straight to that moment in the video.
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00:00 Just a few days ago I saw this post go up. AI is now being used to recreate Adobe software. The developer has released seven free open source tools as clean room alternatives to Adobe's main tools and this includes the likes of Photoshop. They have Photo Craft, Illustrator, Vector Craft, Premiere Pro, Film Craft and so on. All of this is clean room built so no code was actually taken, copied or anything like that.
00:22 All written in Rust which is hilarious. And of course it works perfectly on Linux. And when I say perfectly I mean it truly does. I actually tried out the Film Craft for a full edit on the video and for alpha level software it's really good. Like concerningly good or bad. There's going to be a lot of bad. But damn it, let's focus on the good and that is that this is going to hurt Adobe.
00:47 This user said it best as for people who don't understand how important Adobe is to the art industry in general, how predatory they are, this is the equivalent of AI finding the cure to cancer and the response of a lot of people being I'd rather have cancer than that AI find the cure. Which I get it. For for the most part generative content absolutely sucks and it's just not good.
01:10 But this is really a moment in time where AI is actually starting to benefit the general consumer in opposed to being the primary benefactor being these large conglomerate corporations. Just in the last couple weeks all these different things have been happening with one of them being gaming. People are able to completely reverse engineer these games that are like my childhood staples.
01:32 I'm talking the good Call of Duty's, Oblivion and all those kinds of games. Seeing some absolute wild stuff there. Ah, it's so conflicting. Everything's so conflicting. But you know what's not conflicting? Well, kind of is too. But our sponsor, Whisper Flow. I'm a chronic voice to text user. The problem is the built-in voice to text on my phone and probably your phone sucks.
01:54 It types um, it can't spell out anything technical. So, for the last couple weeks, I've been using WhisperFlow instead. It's a voice-to-text tool that works in basically every app. Hey Jenny, um, the the new NAS is racked, TrueNAS with two U devs. Um, no, wait, there's three U devs. Um, want to help me move the Proxmox VMs over on Saturday? Very nice.
02:24 It caught the change in the number of U devs, and it actually spelled out TrueNAS and Proxmox correctly. And since it works so well, I've actually started using it on this, uh, work MacBook that I have here. So, instead of typing a lazy two-word prompt into Codex, I just talk through the whole thing, and it formats everything for me. Write me a Docker Compose file for image with, um, one Postgres, two Redis, and three machine learning on my Intel iGPU.
02:49 Actually, make that my, uh, Nvidia card, Nvidia video card. WhisperFlow is free to use, and with my link in the description, you can get one month of WhisperFlow Pro with unlimited words. Again, thank you, WhisperFlow, for sponsoring this video. So, back to Adobe and that quote calling them predatory. With that, I'm not just being your typical hater.
03:09 In June 2024, the Department of Justice sued Adobe on behalf of the FTC under the Restore Online Shoppers Confidence Act. The government alleged that they hid a hefty termination fee, and that they made it hard to cancel. And Adobe settled later for a hundred and fifty million dollars. Now, they have to disclose and give people way to actually cancel, but if you've been around, you've seen multiple instances of people complaining about this.
03:36 It's just one thing, and of course, Adobe denied any wrongdoing because that's just what happens with settlements. And this kind of just adds to the practice of these companies going completely to subscription models. If you don't know, uh, Adobe actually had a pretty decent, uh, Creative Suite package that you could go out and just buy outright. I did it.
03:52 I think I bought a Adobe CS4 at one point and it was expensive. I think it was like six to $800. I could technically use my CS4 copy because guess what? I actually have the discs. I technically own it. Now is the common saying you'll own nothing and be happy. And that's kind of the model that they went with and why so many people despise them. An example of a company that is doing quite well but still gives you the option to buy and actually buy it, not lease it, is Blackmagic with DaVinci Resolve.
04:22 I am a DaVinci Resolve enjoyer. It's not open source, it's proprietary, but the software is amazing for the price. They somewhat care about Linux because they actually have a way to install it on Linux. Their hardware is good. I'm recording this video on a Blackmagic 6K, the original one. So it's not like you can't sell your software properly. It's just Adobe again being predatory and greedy.
04:47 And the funny part is it's this whole cancellation fee thing why this Art craft project or at least the Adobe-like creative suite project even started. The developer, Brandon Thomas, great name, no relation. He's the founder of Art craft and at least according to him he got hit with that cancellation fee more than once and that is what spurred the inspiration to build this.
05:08 A thing that's important to note and kind of a disclosure is while these apps are free, MIT and Apache licensed, Art craft also has an original product, that being AI image and video generation tools where you can pay for those AI generation credits, which in turn funds the development of the cool stuff. The only real negative is when I first went to download this, I installed the kind of paid product launcher instead of the app launcher for all these tools.
05:34 So it was a bit confusing at first but I figured it out. That viral post that we talked about earlier named seven apps but right now there's already 12. But what's awesome is they're going after Microsoft too, because they have Word, Grid, Deck, and a sound and CAD solution. There's a launcher that installs everything. And if you're on Linux, you could get, I believe, a deb, an RPM, or a app image.
05:59 PhotoCraft has passed 52,000 stars on GitHub, and most of these repos were created at the very end of September. It's also not a one-person project anymore. As of October 9th, there were 230 contributors across these seven repositories. But, in short, he built this with Claude Opus 5.5. Savvy Nick did a video that I'll link down below, which has a good breakdown of the method, which is black box reverse engineering.
06:22 An agent will study the docs, the file formats, and the how the software actually behaves. And then the agents will split up work by the component and just loop through it testing until it works. PhotoCraft's PSD support is written from Adobe's public spec, and the test compares its output against files generated by the real Photoshop. So, how does it work?
06:41 I've only really tested one of these applications in depth, but there's feedback all over the place. PhotoCraft opens the PSD with layers, it can undo work, and it has Photoshop shortcuts and masking. Text editing fails on Adobe fonts, but his verdict, at least, is pretty usable. Lightroom works with some failures, and it's a little buggy, but for the most part, again, it works.
07:03 And of course, there's other tools such as but really the people who've been using like Photoshop extensively, they're they're not going to use They're going to need something like this that's almost a one-to-one. You could start using it and immediately be comfortable and familiar. Now, I tested Filmora, everything just works. It doesn't stutter, it has kind of the natural rendering that you would see in Premiere Pro for previews.
07:27 Just clicking through and actually using it in real projects, it worked magnificently. There were a couple little things here and there. There was like some buggy UI elements if I dragged things certain ways. If I tried to click and select a portion of clips, but I like keep going and start scrolling, the selection doesn't really work. So, you have to zoom out all the way.
07:51 Um That That's really the only issues that I've noticed at all. Granted, I haven't done anything crazy with effects or anything like that. Right now, they're reporting that they have about 86 or it's probably changed since I'm recording this, but 86% of the features that Adobe Premiere Pro has and ready for real work is at 56% and that's right from the read me on their page.
08:10 There's no FFmpeg inside as it has its own H.264, 65, ProRes, etc. codecs. Again, written by AI from specs, tested against FFmpeg and it all works. I've rendered out a couple things, no issues. So, that's Adobe, but I think kind of the bigger thing here and the thing that most people are going to notice is what's going on in the gaming industry because there is a tool, a GitHub repo called REA or reverse engineer anything.
08:40 It's a MIT licensed MCP server. You could hook it up to a variety of decompilers and actually just autonomously reverse engineer a variety of products. None of the tools to actually like decompile these things are new, but actually hooking it up to an agent, it just really speeds up hooking up what the code is doing to like all the proper variables and things like that.
09:01 There's a huge wave of static recompilations where console games have been getting turned into native PC builds. We've seen this with Wind Waker, Halo Wars running on Apple Silicon with over 60,000 functions recompiled. And how much AI is actually involved uh varies wildly depending on the project. And you know, a lot of this stands on years of human work such as like the Donkey Kong 64 recomp.
09:24 The thing is now AI is just speeding this up incredibly. And then there's the fun stuff, the the stuff you've probably already seen and that is the the crossover mods. Spider-Man 2 doing it. You could whip around as Spider-Man within GTA V. My favorite one is like the uh the Call of Duty Zombies, playing as like a PGA character and using the ball to take out zombies, or even switching out the zombies for Nintendo characters.
09:52 Combining Modern Warfare 2 and Skate is definitely a runner-up. Even things down to people playing like Halo 3 lobbies through a Chrome web browser with 128 people. Absolutely wild. It feels like 2006-2008 era modding where uh basically anything was possible before they really started locking everything down. The days of swapping out a DLL file has returned.
10:19 This stuff is going to get so good, so good at building software. You can you're probably going to be able to dump in a like a screen recording of something into some language model and have it spit out a playable version of what it saw. Uh there's so much going on. Of course, there are huge counterpoints to this. Artists' main objection to AI is that these models were trained on their work without their permission, and that's a real objection.
10:42 And just calling something clean room doesn't really settle it. Savvy Nick put it well in his video, again linked down below. If a model was trained on copywritten code, following the clean room kind of principles and methodology doesn't resolve really any of the questions. If you're an artist, a creator, and this just kind of makes you uncomfortable, I understand.
11:00 It can't can't really say you're wrong. On the gaming side, re-comps of Nintendo products or Nintendo titles obviously carry take-down risks. Nintendo has never been hesitant to act in that way. At least Linux is getting all the tools that we could ever want. It is truly a beautiful day to be a Linux enjoyer. And with all that, have a beautiful day, and goodbye.