I use LLMs for coding every day at work and also use local LLMs at home. From my experience, LLMs can be used to create a better end product than humans alone if the proper discipline is followed.
However, my impression is that ArtCraft is a bunch of vibe coded slop where the goal is to reproduce several apps as quickly as possible by letting the LLM go wild. In that case, you usually end up with something that seems to work in many respects, but eventually collapses under its own weight.
We will see whether ArtCraft ever gets out of alpha and shapes up to be solid, but as someone who has been a software engineer over 20 years, hastily creating a mountain of code and then expecting to come back and fix all the problems later never works. It’s always better to work incrementally and add one feature at a time while building in quality every step of the way.
What I expect is that they will continue adding features and trying to fix the problems, play an extended game of whack-a-mole, then eventually get frustrated and abandon the project.
I detest companies like Adobe and I’d be delighted to have my skepticism be proven wrong and see them end up with replacements for the whole suite that work well and are on solid ground legally. I’d also feel better about this if they were using local models, since spending a fortune in tokens to support a company like Anthropic is certainly not on higher moral ground than supporting Adobe with subscription fees.
In all fairness, I haven’t investigated it thoroughly myself, and my skepticism mainly comes from the proposed timeframe. I’d be less skeptical if they said they were going to focus only on, say, Photoshop and spend a few months reproducing a small subset of its features without decompiling the code while creating a public audit trail of their clean room process that a lawyer helped them create.