VectorCraft Rebuilds Illustrator in Rust, and Scores Itself 62% Ready

One of 13 free Rust programs remaking Adobe’s creative suite, VectorCraft covers about 88% of Illustrator’s tools but rates itself roughly 62% ready for professional work.
software-engineering
artificial-intelligence
Author

Kabui, Charles

Published

2026-10-21

Keywords

open-source-design-tools, vector-illustration, rust-desktop-apps, clean-room-software, ai-written-code

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VectorCraft is a free vector drawing app for macOS, Windows, Linux and the browser, and one of thirteen free Rust programs built by the Atlanta developer Brandon Thomas as replacements for Adobe’s Creative Suite and other paid design tools. Its roadmap, reviewed on 10 October, is blunt: about 88% of Adobe Illustrator’s menu items, tools, effects and formats exist, feature depth is about 75%, and readiness for an ordinary illustrator’s real work is about 62%. The repository is three weeks old, at version 0.14.0, and still labelled alpha. Gizmodo reports Thomas built them with Claude Opus 5.5, and the roadmap budgets the rest in “agent hours”: 170 to 270 to reach beta.

The apps are small: Tedium’s reviewer noted they load in tens of megabytes rather than hundreds, and the README claims 20,000 shapes render in about 27 milliseconds while the interface holds 120 frames per second. It also targets files, not just tools: documents from Serif’s Affinity suite open natively, legacy Illustrator 7 files keep their layers, and it writes PDF-compatible .ai, SVG and EPS. Adobe’s terms forbid reverse engineering, so the project bars anyone from launching or even screenshotting Illustrator, and behaviour comes only from public specifications. A Gizmodo reviewer said the Photoshop sibling feels like “glitchy, but real, Photoshop”.

On Hacker News, Thomas said the apps are “not anywhere close to ready” and offered to pay bug bounties.

Read More: Figma: Turn Any Live Webpage Into Editable Design Layers

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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{kabui2026,
  author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
  title = {VectorCraft {Rebuilds} {Illustrator} in {Rust,} and {Scores}
    {Itself} 62\% {Ready}},
  date = {2026-10-21},
  url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/artcraft-vectorcraft-clean-room-adobe-rust/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kabui, Charles. 2026. “VectorCraft Rebuilds Illustrator in Rust, and Scores Itself 62% Ready.” https://toknow.ai/posts/artcraft-vectorcraft-clean-room-adobe-rust/.