Thirteen apps that replace Photoshop, Excel and AutoCAD — and the CLI nobody installs

On 2026-10-23 I installed every ArtCraft "Crafting App" on this Mac, then drove all thirteen from the terminal instead of the GUI. The apps are real and they are free. The installer is incomplete, the free-tier claims are fuzzy, and "AI cracked Adobe" is the wrong story — here is the version with receipts.

01Why it looks exactly like a crack

The tell is menu parity. PhotoCraft ships Photoshop's menus, shortcuts and even an "Adobe Camera Raw Filter" entry. If you only looked at the UI you would swear it was a repack. So I opened the installed binary and looked for Adobe's fingerprints.

A PSD reader has to speak those namespace strings — that is the format. There is no Adobe code in there to patch. What exists is a from-scratch implementation that reads and writes the same files.

02The AI part, though, is true

This is where the rumour comes from, and it is not a misunderstanding — it is an under-statement. The repositories ship an AGENTS.md (18.7 KB, literally "a guide for AI agents and contributors") plus an in-tree .claude/rules/ directory. The commit log behaves like an agent works: roughly 100 commits in under 24 hours across about ten contributors, in thirteen separate repositories, each one chasing 1:1 menu and shortcut parity with a commercial app.

03The thirteen apps, as measured on this machine

Stars are from the GitHub API on the same day. "CLI" is the number of commands the app's own commands listing exposes — apps format that listing differently, so the count is entries, not lines. The receipt column is deliberate: only rows with a real receipt claim a feature. Everywhere else it says "CLI responds", because that is all I verified.

04The gap nobody mentions: the installer is half a product

Every one of these apps exposes its entire command registry to a headless CLI, a JSON control channel and a stdio MCP server — which makes them unusually agent-friendly. But the official launcher installs only the GUIs. There is no <app>-cli on your PATH afterwards, and nothing in the UI points at one. The CLI is a separate release asset per app:

https://github.com/storytold/<app>/releases/download/v<ver>/<app>-cli-<ver>-macos-universal.zip

Thirteen apps × ~130 MB of CLI assets is not a thing anyone wants to assemble by hand, so I wrote the installer I wanted: resumable downloads (curl -C -), quarantine stripping, symlinks into ~/.local/bin, safe to re-run. It is in the download pack below, with a verifier that prints the table I used for §03.

05Receipts

Real files, real commands, no invented numbers. Everything here was run on 2026-10-23 on macOS 26.6 / arm64.

$ pdfcraft-cli audit fake-redacted.pdf
{"count":1,"findings":[{"covered_text":"Complaint reference: HK-2026-77341",
  "kind":"covered-text","page":1}]}
pdfcraft-cli: audit: 1 faux redaction(s) found   # exit 1

06What "free" actually covers

07Download pack

The GUIs come from the official launcher. The CLI layer is what this pack adds: the installer, a verifier, a machine-readable manifest of everything measured above, and a short list of the only download links worth using.

08Limitations, stated plainly

09Evidence

10What I would use it for, today

• PdfCraft instead of pdftoppm + headless Chromium for page rasterising — 12 ms, no browser, plus an audit that catches fake redactions.
• GridCraft wherever a formula must actually evaluate before I hand a workbook over; check is a real oracle, which openpyxl cannot do at all.
• CADCraft → VectorCraft as the bridge from Fusion 360 DXF to laser-ready SVG with the text outlined for LightBurn.
• WordCraft / DeckCraft for converting my own school and workshop documents without opening an office suite.
• Not yet for video, audio or layout work — those five CLIs answer, but I have not proved a single timeline or mix.