336 | “Software Is Over” - 1 guy rebuilt Adobe and Office in 2 weeks 🤯 , A spy hid a mic in toilet paper at OpenAI, 2 New Frontier Models Released, and more important AI news for the week ending October 16, 2026

Isar Meitis (0:00)

Hello, and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, your host. We had another really interesting week, and we have many things to cover. We're going to start with one developer that replicated the entire Adobe Suite, and then the entire Microsoft Office Suite, and then a bunch of other stuff. We're going to continue talking about software, where we're going to talk about how Claude and Gemini are impacting how we work with software, the software we use every single day, and Microsoft as well. We are going to talk about some things that are happening in the frontier. We got a new model from Meta that is almost number one right now, and it is number one on a few different aspects. And then we're going to obviously talk about AI safety, because this time of the race, we have to talk about this, because there's new things to talk about every single week. We are also going to talk about the fact there was an engineer inside of OpenAI that installed bugging devices to record everything that's happening in the most important rooms in OpenAI and a lot of other stuff, including AI safety, including new releases. So lots and lots to cover, lots and lots to talk about. So let's get started.

So the first story that we're going to discuss is Brandon Thomas. Brandon Thomas is an Atlanta based software engineer. His company, Artcraft, started in 2025 as developing AI tools for artists. And he pivoted at the end of September of this year to cloning Adobe. Now, he claims that the motivation was that Adobe charged him early cancellation fee, one time too many, and he got really, really pissed. And then he decided he's going to just replicate everything that they're doing. So in just about two weeks, he went from, I'm going to copy Photoshop to, I'm going to copy everything everybody's using. So he has currently seven free open source apps that are cloning Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. The names that he named them are PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft, and PDFCraft. Now, the first repo went public on September 30th. So, just about two and a half weeks ago, and PhotoCraft alone now has over 44,000 GitHub stars. Now, less than two weeks from the time he started, he now also has WordCraft, GridCraft, which is Excel, Decraft, which is PowerPoint, cloning basically the Microsoft or Google Office Suite, and GridCraft, which is the Excel version, covers 89 percent of all the functions in the ribbon, in the Excel menu.

That's per the developer himself. And on October 7th, so just a week ago, the team added repos for SoundCraft, which is Pro Tools, and CADCraft, which is AutoCAD. And these tools run on Mac, Windows, and Linux. So regardless of where you're running, you can run it and they're all free. You don't need an account, you don't need a subscription. You just go to the repo and you can install these applications. So how the hell is he doing this? And how the hell is he doing it so fast and so effectively? And we're going to talk about effectively in a minute. It's not fully working yet. It's still all in alpha and there are issues, but the speed is just astonishing. So what he's doing is he's using Opus 5.5 as the actual coding tool. He's coding it all in Rust, which is a coding language that he understands and he'd been working in personally before he started doing this. And the method he's using is called Cleanroom. And what Cleanroom does is it basically replicates the user interface and the user interaction with the software. So he doesn't have access to the code. He's not copying the code from Adobe or from anybody else. He's just looking at the outputs very carefully, feature by feature, button by button, and allowing Claude to do this thing. The other aspect that he's doing in order to make this work is he's testing the processes, he's testing the outcome and comparing it to the outcomes from the Adobe tools themselves. So in addition to replicating the user interface, he can replicate the actual detailed output by comparing it to the output every single time until he gets it exactly right. So the result of being able to run this in a loop multiple times is now you can open and resave Photoshop files or any other of the applications that he's using, and render them in the same level. As an example, his test batch has 309 Photoshop files, and 307 of them as of right now render identical results to the results that Photoshop has generated, which basically means every use case other than you have a really edge, weird, strange, crazy, unique use case, and then maybe you will need Photoshop or maybe not. So what does it matter? The way he's doing the testing and the development, it means that most of it is automated. He does not need humans to test anything because all the system does is it runs it through its own capability, compares it to the output from the actual original software, in this particular case Photoshop, and then compares the two. And if it doesn't work exactly the same, it tries to understand why, and it runs the code and fixes it again until it gets it right. So all you have to do is invest in tokens and everything else will happen magically on its own.