A U.S.-based software engineer has used AI tools to recreate free versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, challenging the subscription economics of entrenched software platforms. The project—built with Anthropic’s Claude and the Rust language—offers “clean-room” replacements for Photoshop, PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel, potentially undercutting products that can cost users hundreds of dollars a year. The effort spotlights the rise of “vibe coding,” in which AI generates large swaths of code from natural-language prompts, accelerating development and flooding app stores with new entrants. Legal questions loom over whether such replicas infringe intellectual property, even if built from public specifications, leaving Big Tech exposed to both pricing pressure and regulatory scrutiny.
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