Artcraft, Mindscaper, et al: Can we really just vibecode creative software?
Over the past couple days, massive hype has built up around Artcraft, a collection of literal clones of Adobe’s CC, Microsoft Office and other apps, entirely vibecoded and open source. Artists and creative folks battered by subscriptions costing hundreds and thousands of dollars a year finally smell relief that’s not the poorly designed open source jank of yesteryear, and the project receives dozens of similarly vibecoded pull requests each hour. At the same time, I’ve been building Mindscaper, practically with the same goal, but without the hype. As such, I have some thoughts and bias on this subject. And probably typos, this is 100% human-written.
Background
Artcraft is developed by Learning Machines LLC, which appears to be a one-man company by Brandon Thomas. Thomas previously developed the deepfake services “vo.codes” and “fakeyou.com” under this company, and developed VTubing tech. Judging by the blurb on “the.storyteller.company”, he appears to believe in “controllable AI” trivializing (“democratizing”) art creation, but with Artcraft opted to primarily clone existing professional software, putting AI on the backburner (although an AI subscription service is available).
By a lucky coincidence, I founded my company Koytek Wattenberg Media at a similar point in time, with similarly limited success. One of my biggest clients became Audacity, at which I worked on “democratizing” audio creation, and wouldn’t you know I’m also into VTubers. I started my foray into vibecoding about half a year after Artcraft, focusing on Audacity-shaped audio and video editors, Soundscaper and Framescaper.
On technical matters
I have nothing new to say here that hasn’t been already said a billion times. Modern coding robots (I used Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol mostly) are perfectly capable of making something that Just Works. They just happen to be lying, lazy bastards that will happily claim something exists when it doesn’t. Test-driven development principles keep them reasonably honest, though they occasionally do manage to find a way to write tests so unspecific that a pixel-by-pixel spectrogram in the Roseus color scheme and a spectrogram with much coarser buckets using a blue-to-yellow color scheme pass the same test.
I am under no illusion that the code they’ve produced isn’t ugly and suboptimal. But then, the Audacity codebase is 25 years old and also extremely ugly and suboptimal. The Audacity team – all extremely talented software engineers and beautiful people – have been unable to make Audacity 4 feature-equivalent to Audacity 3 in over a year, despite that “only” being a UI migration with some UX changes attached. With Soundscaper, I managed to get an app going featuring all of Audacity 3’s and 4’s features within 3 months, plus a plethora of additional DAW features and video editor on top of it. Similarly, Artcraft managed to get a Photoshop (and general Adobe CC) clone going in half a year.
On practical matters
While the robots are perhaps good enough to get functionality implemented, they suck at figuring out the finer details – and pretty much all of the design.
Robots suck at progressive disclosure
Progressive disclosure is the part of UX where, instead of showing everything at once, you show things as they’re needed. A trivial example for this would be a menu; the “Format” menu is reduced to that single word on your screen until you, the user, decide that now is the time to format something and click on it, revealing a dozen or so options.
Robots suck at this. If you tell them to add a feature, they’ll generally attempt to place it on screen with a dedicated button. This is fine for an app with 6 controls in total, but less so for a complex creation app with 500. Forcing them to chuck everything into menus and dialogs helps, but then we’re straight back into design paradigms from the 80s.
This is where Artcraft and Mindscaper both have an advantage over a pure vibecoded approach: Artcraft already knows where everything goes because they’re busy copying existing design. I know where my stuff goes because I am the designer, and thus have a very strong idea on what these features are, how they should work, where they should go and when they should show up.
Robots suck at information density
In a similar vein to the thing above, robots love to implement stuff as “Control title – control – explanation sentence”. Again, this is fine for a small dialog with 2 controls in it, but for any sufficiently complex effect it just either overwhelms people with too many words and/or requires things to be spaced so far apart to fit all this extra text that the dialog becomes massive.
And again, cloning existing dialogs works here, as does being the original designer to make relevant decisions. Purely vibecoding this from scratch is going to be much more difficult though.
Robots suck at asking the right questions
The biggest difference between working with humans and working with robots is what questions I’m being asked. With the Audacity team, I’d get asked about user edge cases as they popped up, I’d get asked about clarifications on my designs, I’d get asked about things by users. With the robots, there are a lot fewer of these kinds of questions; the only time the robot asks questions at all seems to be in plan mode. However, in plan mode, the questions that are being asked almost always are implementation-centric, ie the stuff I don’t really care about. So what ends up happening is that the robot will go ahead and do something, proudly proclaim it’s finished and then it’s up to me to QA whether it actually did the right stuff. And more often than not, it misses some design edge case.
On philosophical matters
In this section I’d want to talk about the should and shouldn’ts of vibecoding a creative software suite.
Copyright
Artcraft is copying various proprietary programs wholesale using AI. On Artcraft’s side, this has all the usual copyright questions attached (who is the author? is the code copyrightable?), though on Adobe’s side this becomes more interesting: From Tetris v. Xio, we know that the look and feel of a program (in that case, Tetris) can be copyrightable. Note that this is different from copyright on the code itself (which I don’t think Artcraft can even infringe given that their thing is in Rust, which Adobe’s stuff probably isn’t), and also is different from attempting to claim copyright on the app’s structure or underlying ideas (that’s patent stuff, not copyright).
Artcraft thus may be in for a rude awakening should Adobe feel threatened by them. Adobe may or may not win this case, but they also probably don’t need to in order to hobble Artcraft’s development for years to come. Funnily enough, the actual code being open source may be a saving grace here, as it likely can trivially be forked, copied and modified to avoid Adobe’s gaze, to a better degree than pirates ever could. Another point in favor of Artcraft is AI itself; any rulings in favor of copyright holders over AI developers is also a ruling against Adobe’s own products. It thus may be that Adobe opts to do… nothing, in order to avoid the backblast. I don’t think they’ll necessarily care about the possibility of a Streisand; lawsuits like this generally are boring enough for the wider press to not care beyond perhaps a single story in the margins.
Mindscaper meanwhile doesn’t have that problem, as Soundscaper is building upon an open source app and crediting it, and Framescaper is original.
Patents
Software patents unfortunately arguably exist, some of them on UI (eg the Ribbon pattern found in MS Office). Adobe, unsurprisingly, has a tens of thousands of patents.
Software patents are one level more devious than mere copyright: It doesn’t matter that you had the idea all on your own, or that the idea may be obvious now, all that matters is that someone else also had the idea before you. And if they have registered it, you now are in trouble. It’s because of software patents that loading screens don’t have minigames, it’s because of software patents that Audacity makes you jump through hoops to download FFmpeg, as there are still over 3000 patents in the AAC patent pool alone. And if just a singular patent survives litigation, which given the sheer number of patents involved is gonna take forever anyway, you’re on the hook for yet more damages.
Software patents are the ideal tool for corporations to shut down people they don’t like, hence why some corporations (including Adobe and Microsoft, the companies most likely to be upset by what Artcraft is doing here) engage in non-aggression pacts with each other, like the Allied Security Trust or Open Innovation Network – this prevents these companies being at each other’s throats for patent reasons all the time.
However, these defensive alliances generally don’t apply to people outside the alliance, and neither Artcraft nor Mindscaper are in one. Thus, whenever one of the incumbents ends up being upset or feel threatened by what’s happening, they can pull the litigation lever.
I don’t know which patents could be relevant here, and frankly, I also don’t wanna know – in the end it doesn’t really matter. Patents are a risk factor for any software, and typically best left ignored as patent holders tend to be more busy with actual business than going after one-man companies. However, when you sufficiently piss off a company – and I’d argue that wholesale cloning of a software might constitute that – you have a lot stacked against you.
Freeing users
Subscription services for software create incentives for the builder of the software to put as little work as possible into the software while charging as much as possible. This allows the Autodesks and Adobes of the world to charge ridiculous amounts, while providing software so bad that it regularly attracts user petitions, begging them to fix longstanding bugs degrading the experience.
Simply providing free software alternatives here may work (eg in the case of blender and musescore), or may not work, as free software does (or at least: used to) suffer from small development teams and quite frequently UX so weird that it wasn’t possible for some folks to figure out how to use the program in question. A famous example for this is the “make a circle in GIMP”. The solution is to make an elliptical selection, intuit that you can convert that to a path, and then use a panel to draw the path – as opposed to Photoshop, where you just use the circle tool.
Providing free software versions of a program would indeed free people of subscription software to use something else, depending on the copyright situation more or less easy compared to pirating, and this is what Artcraft does provide.
Freeing new users
However, I’ve found that the entire creative software field suffers from underdeveloped design. A lot of professional-grade software is modeled after pre-digital hardware and uses design metaphors that simply don’t make sense if you haven’t experienced said hardware. I remember when Lightworks, an Oscar-winning video editor, became a free download in 2010, I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out, not even typically simple things like rendering the video. This is despite me having had some experience in Sony Movie Maker (the cheap version of Vegas) and Powerdirector.
This is understandable somewhat: To attract professional users in the 80s and 90s, you’d need to replicate their workflows from their pre-digital tools. And once you have these users and they’ve learned how to use the program, they’d hate to have to adapt to a new design. However, this also leads to new users having to jump through enormous quantities of hoops trying to learn the program. If you want to “democratize” art creation, making things free and open source is one thing, but the barrier to entry of learning the tool remains the same.
This is where my work on Audacity (and now Soundscaper) becomes relevant: It takes quite a bit of design work, but it in principle should be possible to design a complex creation app in such a way to make it easy to use. Notably, not everything has to be equally easy – setting up a simple recording should be a one-button operation, while setting up a more complex multi-track recording may be a bit more involved, as we can expect the user to have a more clear task in mind on which input goes to which track.
Our vision for Audacity (and Musescore for that matter) was to completely starve the current incumbents of new users by just having a much more modern design and having an app that’s easier to get into. I still think this is the way things will shake out eventually; we’ve already seen Finale starve to death from this pressure.
Artists
Of course, AI bros would go further here and envision a future where skill is completely replaced by AI. And while for things that already were sloppy and primarily utilitarian to begin with (shitposts, local business signage, anything using Wordart/clipart in the past), AI certainly is going to replace more dedicated tools, I don’t see it doing so for artists. To draw a chess analogy, computers have been better than humans in chess for a long time, yet humans still play chess, for one simple reason: It’s fun. Similarly, artists don’t really care if a robot can do a hyperrealistic godzilla in mere seconds, as the fun part of making art is actually creating it, not just admiring the result (that would be mere consumption).
As an artist, you of course get to pick your battles. You can decide that shading or coloring is too annoying, and stick to strict black and white, or that mixing and mastering is too annoying and stick to making melodies and chords. From there you can hire someone to do the shading and coloring and additional work for you, or indeed use AI instead. In either case, your initial creative vision gets diluted by the other work; the more people are involved and the heavier the AI use, the more diluted your vision gets. This can be acceptable to you, especially in a world where art is traded as a commercial good, but if we assume that art as a good is going to lose worth, this tradeoff may become less worthwhile, perhaps making it so that you only wants tools strictly designed for you to express yourself.
For-profit open source
Having both worked at and seen for-profit open source, I’m perhaps a bit jaded:
- We see companies close access to their source the moment they feel like they can extract revenue out of it (various server software comes to mind)
- We see companies increase the amount of closed components in open source software, to guarantee only they can have a revenue stream (VSCode and Android come to mind)
- We see companies add user-hostile features to benefit only themselves (Google Chrome/Android is the poster-child here, to the point where regulators need to step in to it)
There might be a way to make a for-profit company be a good steward of an open source project, but the incentives always point in a different direction – and even if the current leadership can resist these incentives, the next one can flip towards enshittification so fast. I haven’t seen Thomas’ Artcraft project enough yet to know whether he’ll stay true to open source, though given he already has a subscription service (for cloud AI compute, of course) and a launcher ready, I gotta say that I’m worried.
It’s for this reason that I spun out Soundscaper from my company kw.media into Mindscaper, a non-profit association. It is now immune to me, or anyone else for that matter, deciding I would like it to make me tons of money, as long as its members (so, ideally, the users) don’t want to be milked. As an association (as opposed to a foundation), it also is way more democratic, giving users a real voice in what should happen to Soundscaper.
Resources & Sustainability
It’s impossible to discuss AI without touching upon the massive resource use it causes. Throughout my time developing Soundscaper, I have burnt through Codex’ and Claude’s 20x subscription quota almost every single reset cycle, including OpenAI’s ridiculous practice of vibing when a reset occurs and having a dude announce it on twitter. This has cost me hundreds of dollars, would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars in API cost, and has cost OpenAI and Anthropic likely thousands of dollars as well.
It is clear to me that the current pricing isn’t sustainable, and that slowly but surely, costs will go up. It is for this reason that Soundscaper uses local inference whenever useful and won’t be integrating with any cloud AI services. As far as I’m concerned, the entire point of open source is to fuck around with stuff on the machines you have access to and have it not tied to some service which decides what is and isn’t allowed.
It also is clear to me that there are real environmental impacts vibecoding this hard has; especially when comparing how long and hard my local setup has to work to achieve much simpler tasks (I let gemma and aya-expanse handle translation work locally, for example). Thus, I try to limit my vibecoding to the areas I really care about. I have a media background, so I shall vibecode media tools I’ll personally use – as opposed to token-maxxing just because I can.
Conclusion
So, can we vibecode creative software? On a technical level, yes. On a design level, yes, if we are a designer or follow someone else’s design. But should we? Depending on how adventurous we are with copyright and patent laws, especially if we are just re-implementing someone else’s design – maybe not.
We absolutely should open source and reverse engineer the things we care about, but we shouldn’t take a robot’s “one-shot” in an area we know nothing about as proof that it’s good now. It’s enormously easy to slop a whole software suite into existence but it actually takes some real work to get the software suite to actually be usable by real people – and surely, the benefit to real people has to be the goal.
If you’re interested in contributing to a non-profit making creative software, consider joining Mindscaper.
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