Every app on Earth is now open source... whether it likes it or not
FFireship@Fireship · 4.3M subscribers
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0:00–0:25Last week, a developer got so tired of Adobe's predatory business model that he decided to rebuild seven of its Creative Cloud apps with Rust, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, then open-sourced them, and gave them away for free. The project is called ArtCraft, and the developer's name is Brandon Thomas, who, after being hit with Adobe's cancellation fee more than once, opened up Claude, then reverse-engineered Adobe's 30-plus-year code base from scratch. And the apps
Structure
Last week, a developer got so tired of Adobe's predatory business model that he decided to rebuild seven of its Creative Cloud apps with Rust, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, then open-sourced them, and gave them away for free. The project is called ArtCraft, and the developer's name is Brandon Thomas, who, after being hit with Adobe's cancellation fee more than once, opened up Claude, then reverse-engineered Adobe's 30-plus-year code base from scratch. And the apps even run on Linux, a platform Adobe has never officially supported. What's crazy, though, is that you, the human being watching this video, can do the same thing thanks to an unrelated project called reverse-engineer-anything. It's been going viral on the internet lately because it can easily decompile any native binaries you can get your hands on. We're talking stripped ELF, PE, and Mach-O executables, JVM bytecode with obfuscated constant pools, ECMA-335-compliant .NET assemblies, bare-metal firmware with architecture-specific instruction sets, and even OCI container layers entangled in declarative infrastructure manifests. In layman's terms, that means virtually every app in the world is now open-source, whether it wants to be or not. In today's video, we'll attempt to reverse-engineer anything and everything and find out if this is the final nail in the coffin for software as we know it. It is October 12th, 2026, and you're watching The Code Report. So, is it really true that one person plus Claude made the entire Adobe suite obsolete overnight? Well, on the surface, yes. As you can see on the website, you can download a Rust-based version of any Adobe program for free right now. That's awesome, but after trying it out myself, I realized there's one small catch. The
Watch from 0:00software is a nearly unusable pile of vibe-coded horse Now, I begrudgingly pay Adobe a $69 tribute every month to use Premiere to edit these videos for you guys, and I was thrilled to finally see an open-source alternative. And let's just ignore the fact that DaVinci Resolve has been an open-source alternative for over 20 years now. And when I first opened FilmCraft, I was thrilled to see that the UI was nearly a one-to-one clone of Premiere. So, I could get to work immediately without any learning curve. My plan was to edit this video with it, but the cracks became visible immediately. Like after dragging a clip of some lame stock video onto the timeline and hitting play, there was a massive lag in the audio bars and just overall slowness and laziness despite being vibe coded in rust, which I've been told is a blazingly fast programming language. So then, I tried implementing some transitions between clips and they were just nowhere near the quality of Premiere, which you can clearly see with this glitch transition side-by-side. And for someone like me who's a once-in-a-generation cinematic visionary who many have called the Stanley Kubrick of sponsored posts, the sad reality is that Film Craft is just not good enough yet. But I sincerely hope it gets there someday because Adobe. But then that got me thinking, what if instead of trying to use off-brand Premiere, I just reverse engineer it myself and make it simpler because Premiere has hundreds of features that I don't use that just get in the way. Luckily, there's a new project in town that can help us do that called reverse engineer anything. Adobe Premiere is primarily written in C and C++, and crazy smart Asians on H-1B visas have been writing its code for decades. Now, its actual source code is top secret Adobe intellectual property, but in order to actually run it on your
Watch from 1:31machine, they need to compile that code into a native binary of ones and zeros. This stuff is almost unreadable to humans, but with a lot of painstaking work, it is technically possible to map these ones and zeros back into something that resembles human readable source code. And the REA project can do that for people who can't even count to three in binary. First, we set it up by running it with Node.js and the NPX command. And then because I'm a loser on Microsoft Windows, we'll configure REA's Ghidra integration, which is actually the tool that deserves the most credit here and can do a read-only analysis of native EXEs and DLLs. Then from there, we can just use it like any other AI agent and tell it to inspect the locally installed version of Adobe Premiere. In this case, I'll have it inspect Adobe's timeline integration and try to figure out how it does this one specific feature. A while later, we get back a bunch of C-like pseudo code along with assembly, strings, symbols, calls, and references, which to an obsolete HTML programmer is all pretty useless. However, we can now take this garbage code and pass it off to our favorite coding agent to re-implement the exact same feature in Rust. And thanks to reverse engineering, I'll eventually be able to build my own version of Premiere Light that's not only free, but only has the actual features I want to use. But as a cheapskate developer, I'm not stopping there. I think it's crazy that any real vibe developer in 2026 is still paying money for developer tools when that money should be spent burning tokens. For example, let's take a look at an ancient technology called Supabase, which is basically a wrapper on top of AWS that provides a UI for your database. Even though it's mostly
Watch from 3:02open source, it has a ton of features I don't want. So what I'm doing instead is using the networking feature in REA to analyze API interactions and UI changes, which has allowed me to build a better back-end that I'm calling Studbase, which is not only perfectly tailored to the needs of Horse Tender and Donker, but is also orders of magnitude and faster according to this benchmark I just made up. Trust me, bro. You can trust these trust me, bro benchmarks. And another thing you can trust is Appify, the sponsor of today's video. Their MCP server lets you connect your agent to thousands of tools called actors. They can do things like scrape live data from YouTube or monitor your competitors' prices on Amazon. But right now, I'm using it to track the most liked posts on the Donkeys of Instagram hashtag so I can invite the most desirable assets to sign up on Donker. It only takes one line to connect to the server, and I could explain what I wanted it to do in natural language. From there, my agent started using the relevant Appify tools to return to the structured data I needed in order to help these gay donkeys find love. But the most impressive part was how few tokens it took. But because Appify's MCP server only exposes a handful of core tools, it then finds the best one for your job and runs it in the background to avoid token bloat. You get $25 in free credits to try it out by using the code fireship25 at the link below. This has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Watch from 4:32Full transcript
- 0:00
Last week, a developer got so tired of Adobe's predatory business model that he decided to rebuild seven of its Creative Cloud apps with Rust, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, then open-sourced them, and gave them away for free. The project is called ArtCraft, and the developer's name is Brandon Thomas, who, after being hit with Adobe's cancellation fee more than once, opened up Claude, then
- 0:21
reverse-engineered Adobe's 30-plus-year code base from scratch. And the apps even run on Linux, a platform Adobe has never officially supported. What's crazy, though, is that you, the human being watching this video, can do the same thing thanks to an unrelated project called reverse-engineer-anything. It's been going viral on the internet lately because it can easily decompile any native binaries you can get your hands
- 0:42
on. We're talking stripped ELF, PE, and Mach-O executables, JVM bytecode with obfuscated constant pools, ECMA-335-compliant .NET assemblies, bare-metal firmware with architecture-specific instruction sets, and even OCI container layers entangled in declarative infrastructure manifests. In layman's terms, that means virtually every app in the world is now open-source, whether it wants to be or
- 1:03
not. In today's video, we'll attempt to reverse-engineer anything and everything and find out if this is the final nail in the coffin for software as we know it. It is October 12th, 2026, and you're watching The Code Report. So, is it really true that one person plus Claude made the entire Adobe suite obsolete overnight? Well, on the surface, yes. As you can see on the website, you can download a Rust-based version of any
- 1:24
Adobe program for free right now. That's awesome, but after trying it out myself, I realized there's one small catch. The software is a nearly unusable pile of vibe-coded horse Now, I begrudgingly pay Adobe a $69 tribute every month to use Premiere to edit these videos for you guys, and I was thrilled to finally see an open-source alternative. And let's just ignore the fact that DaVinci Resolve has been an
- 1:44
open-source alternative for over 20 years now. And when I first opened FilmCraft, I was thrilled to see that the UI was nearly a one-to-one clone of Premiere. So, I could get to work immediately without any learning curve. My plan was to edit this video with it, but the cracks became visible immediately. Like after dragging a clip of some lame stock video onto the timeline and hitting play, there was a massive lag in the audio bars and just
- 2:06
overall slowness and laziness despite being vibe coded in rust, which I've been told is a blazingly fast programming language. So then, I tried implementing some transitions between clips and they were just nowhere near the quality of Premiere, which you can clearly see with this glitch transition side-by-side. And for someone like me who's a once-in-a-generation cinematic visionary who many have called the Stanley Kubrick of sponsored posts,
- 2:28
the sad reality is that Film Craft is just not good enough yet. But I sincerely hope it gets there someday because Adobe. But then that got me thinking, what if instead of trying to use off-brand Premiere, I just reverse engineer it myself and make it simpler because Premiere has hundreds of features that I don't use that just get in the way. Luckily, there's a new project in town that can help us do that called reverse engineer anything. Adobe
- 2:49
Premiere is primarily written in C and C++, and crazy smart Asians on H-1B visas have been writing its code for decades. Now, its actual source code is top secret Adobe intellectual property, but in order to actually run it on your machine, they need to compile that code into a native binary of ones and zeros. This stuff is almost unreadable to humans, but with a lot of painstaking
- 3:10
work, it is technically possible to map these ones and zeros back into something that resembles human readable source code. And the REA project can do that for people who can't even count to three in binary. First, we set it up by running it with Node.js and the NPX command. And then because I'm a loser on Microsoft Windows, we'll configure REA's Ghidra integration, which is actually
- 3:30
the tool that deserves the most credit here and can do a read-only analysis of native EXEs and DLLs. Then from there, we can just use it like any other AI agent and tell it to inspect the locally installed version of Adobe Premiere. In this case, I'll have it inspect Adobe's timeline integration and try to figure out how it does this one specific feature. A while later, we get back a bunch of C-like pseudo code along with
- 3:51
assembly, strings, symbols, calls, and references, which to an obsolete HTML programmer is all pretty useless. However, we can now take this garbage code and pass it off to our favorite coding agent to re-implement the exact same feature in Rust. And thanks to reverse engineering, I'll eventually be able to build my own version of Premiere Light that's not only free, but only has the actual features I want to use. But
- 4:13
as a cheapskate developer, I'm not stopping there. I think it's crazy that any real vibe developer in 2026 is still paying money for developer tools when that money should be spent burning tokens. For example, let's take a look at an ancient technology called Supabase, which is basically a wrapper on top of AWS that provides a UI for your database. Even though it's mostly open source, it has a ton of features I
- 4:34
don't want. So what I'm doing instead is using the networking feature in REA to analyze API interactions and UI changes, which has allowed me to build a better back-end that I'm calling Studbase, which is not only perfectly tailored to the needs of Horse Tender and Donker, but is also orders of magnitude and faster according to this benchmark I just made up. Trust me, bro. You can
- 4:55
trust these trust me, bro benchmarks. And another thing you can trust is Appify, the sponsor of today's video. Their MCP server lets you connect your agent to thousands of tools called actors. They can do things like scrape live data from YouTube or monitor your competitors' prices on Amazon. But right now, I'm using it to track the most liked posts on the Donkeys of Instagram
- 5:15
hashtag so I can invite the most desirable assets to sign up on Donker. It only takes one line to connect to the server, and I could explain what I wanted it to do in natural language. From there, my agent started using the relevant Appify tools to return to the structured data I needed in order to help these gay donkeys find love. But the most impressive part was how few tokens it took. But because Appify's MCP
- 5:36
server only exposes a handful of core tools, it then finds the best one for your job and runs it in the background to avoid token bloat. You get $25 in free credits to try it out by using the code fireship25 at the link below. This has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Description
SponsorEvery agent needs proper tools. Apify MCP gives yours thousands of them, ready to run. Use code FIRESHIP25 for $25 in free credits: https://apify.it/4ygURHS
A developer just rewrote seven Adobe apps in Rust and open-sourced them for free. Let's test them out.
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