Two AI stories took over tech news in October 2026. A developer rebuilt seven Adobe apps with Claude, and a GitHub project called REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) went from mostly unknown to over 100,000 stars in about a week. Put them together and you get a scary headline: AI can copy any software now.
I made two short explainer videos on what actually happened. This post sums them up and adds the sources. It describes the news; it is not legal advice.
Video 1: Can AI replace your software subscriptions?
What happened. ArtCraft, by developer Brandon Thomas, is a set of seven free, open-source apps that do the jobs of Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. They were written with Anthropic's Claude in the Rust programming language and run on Mac, Windows and Linux. The developer calls them "clean-room" rebuilds: written from scratch to do the same jobs, without copying Adobe's code. That is his own description, not an independent finding.
What the headlines skip. The project says it is in alpha. Reviewers found missing video-editing features, and trouble with some photo formats and with saving files. The generative AI features are optional paid add-ons. Matching a feature list isn't the same as working the same way on a deadline.
What it really shows. Small, simple software just got much cheaper to build. Think of the tools you pay $10 to $40 a month for that each do one job: a form that becomes a spreadsheet row, an appointment reminder email, a quote calculator, a dashboard that pulls three numbers together.
The 3-question test before you replace any subscription:
- Can you write down every rule it follows? If it doesn't fit on a page, AI can't build it reliably.
- What breaks if it goes down? If the answer is payroll, payments or customer data, keep paying the vendor.
- Who maintains it next year? Someone has to fix it when something changes.
If all three answers are good, it's a candidate. Then: write the rules on one page, build the smallest version, test it with no customer data, run it side by side with the paid tool for a month, and cancel only when it has kept up every week and someone owns it.
One line not to cross: rebuild what a tool does, not what it is. Don't copy another company's code, logo, look or content, and don't give an AI tool a vendor's private files.
Video 2: AI reverse engineering explained
What reverse engineering means. Working backwards from a finished program to understand how it works. Experts do it to find security bugs, make old software work with new systems, and keep programs running that nobody maintains anymore, usually with tools like Ghidra, IDA or Hopper.
What REA is. An open-source connector (an MCP server) that lets AI coding agents such as Claude Code drive those expert tools: open a program, inspect its functions, trace what it does and test guesses. It runs on your own computer.
What its own documentation says. Native analysis returns "pseudocode and assembly, not original source." You get a map of how a program behaves, not its code. The docs also say it isn't a sandbox, and what the agent sees goes to your AI provider.
How it held up. In a public test by CellCog, it parsed 1,706 files with zero failures and kept careful evidence records. It also loaded 207 tools before answering anything, wrote 234 MB of output, and in another test missed two entry points in a desktop app. A lighter fork scored almost the same (74 of 75 against 75 of 75), faster and cheaper. Useful for experts; not a copy button.
Three rules for small businesses:
- Only study software you own or have permission to study. Check the license first.
- Never upload a vendor's private code or a client's files to an AI tool.
- Don't hide passwords or keys in apps you ship. Tools like this make them easy to find.
The short version
AI didn't end software, and it didn't make copying apps legal or easy. It made small tools cheaper to build and expert analysis faster. For most small businesses that means two things: rebuild the small, simple tools carefully, and protect what you ship.
Sources
- PetaPixel, Oct 7, 2026: Someone rebuilt free, open-source versions of Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom using AI
- TechRepublic, Oct 14, 2026: Developer uses Claude AI to build 7 free Adobe alternatives
- REA on GitHub
- InfoQ, Oct 17, 2026: Reverse Engineer Anything project brings AI agents to binary analysis
- DEV Community, Oct 12, 2026: REA star growth
- CellCog, Oct 18, 2026: We reverse engineered REA
The videos use a synthetic narrator voice (Piper text-to-speech, LibriTTS model, CC BY 4.0).