Every week my feed tells me CAD is next. An AI agent cloned Adobe. NVIDIA open-sourced a geometry kernel. So a free AutoCAD, SolidWorks, or Fusion must be a few weekends away, right?
Not quite. And I say that as someone who wants the challengers to win, because competition makes everyone’s tools better.
What actually happened
Brandon Thomas and his company ArtCraft released seven open-source apps that mimic Adobe’s lineup, built with Claude Opus 5.5 in Rust. The promise was 100% feature parity in a month. The project’s own roadmap is more honest: PhotoCraft covers about 76% of Photoshop’s features but is only about 45% ready for real work. Impressive. Not a replacement yet. And for the record, I’d love a real alternative to Photoshop and Lightroom.
The Reddit crowd is split three ways. Some say it’s a two-week-old alpha, so chill out. Some call it a UI skin mistaken for software. Others are asking why nobody’s talking about GIMP and Inkscape. They’re all a little bit right. And nearly everyone agrees Adobe had this coming.
And it’s not stopping at Adobe. Thomas has since released GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. And now CADCraft, an open-source, clean-room take on AutoCAD written in Rust. Here’s the part the headlines skip. The project’s own roadmap, dated October 7, puts it at about 29% overall parity with AutoCAD and about 55% for 2D drafting, with 3D modeling still the biggest gap. Credit to them for publishing honest numbers.
The same week, NVIDIA open-sourced USD BRep. Underneath is SMLib, a commercial kernel NVIDIA bought in 2022 that ClassCAD has built on for over 20 years. What’s new is the Apache 2.0 license and a USD wrapper.
Will people build new geometry tools on it? Absolutely. Within a day, AWV Informatik, the team behind ClassCAD, shipped a Python library with an MCP server on top of it and patched kernel bugs NVIDIA hadn’t caught. That’s open source working the way it should.
A kernel is not a CAD program
Licensed kernels like Parasolid and ACIS have been available for decades. Open Cascade has been free for years and powers FreeCAD. If the kernel were the hard part, we’d already have a dozen SolidWorks clones.
The hard part is everything on top. Sketch solvers, feature history, assemblies, drawings that meet standards, decades of DWG files that have to open exactly right, and the add-ins firms depend on. NVIDIA’s release includes none of that, not even a STEP translator. In my world it’s Civil 3D corridors, surfaces, and data shortcuts. A kernel doesn’t know what superelevation is.
Free alternatives aren’t new either. GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, FreeCAD, Blender. They’re pretty good, and most firms still pay. Price was never what kept people on the big tools. File fidelity, workflow, support, and trust do.
The frustration is real
Customers have been getting more frustrated for years, and they have their reasons. Subscription terms keep tightening. Prices go up every year; Adobe’s Photography plan went from $9.99 to $14.99 a month. Features people ask for take years to show up, if they show up at all. And from the customer side of the table, it looks like vendor profits only move one direction. I’ve sat on both sides of that table, so I understand why each side sees it differently.
Support and customer contact have thinned out too. Fewer people to talk to, fewer support options included in what customers pay for, and more pointers to the community forums. I’m all for community. I’ve spent most of my career in it. But peer-to-peer help should be a bonus, not the support plan. When customers are paying every year, they shouldn’t be the ones answering each other’s tickets for free. Vendors should be out here helping their customers.
Clean room isn’t risk-free
Rooting against someone isn’t a product, though. And the way some of these projects describe their process should give people pause. CADCraft’s own rules for its AI agents let them run AutoCAD, screenshot it, and recreate what it does. To be fair, the same rules also set real guardrails:
- No reading or disassembling anything inside the AutoCAD install.
- No Autodesk fonts, hatches, linetypes, icons, templates, or help text.
- File formats only from Autodesk’s published DXF reference and the Open Design Alliance’s public DWG spec.
- No copying, or even reading, open-source CAD code like FreeCAD, LibreCAD, or LibreDWG.
That’s careful work. But it’s still reverse engineering, not writing your own software. “Clean room” can help with copyright, but it does nothing for patents, and software license agreements typically prohibit reverse engineering. Courts have enforced clauses like that before.
We’ve seen this movie before. In 2014 Autodesk sued ZWSOFT, claiming ZWCAD+ carried AutoCAD’s own bugs and quirks. A year later ZWSOFT paid a settlement, admitted an employee had improperly used AutoCAD intellectual property, and pulled ZWCAD+ from the market. Engineers I know who were involved told me it first surfaced when a demo threw the exact same error as AutoCAD. Identical bugs are hard to explain away.
I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t put an engineering firm’s deliverables on software that might get pulled next quarter, or on a file format that’s 91% compatible. That last 9% is usually the part that matters.
Take a deep breath
Let’s see how this shakes out. Just don’t cancel your subscriptions yet.
More alternatives are coming. Some will be good. Some will be rushed vibe-coded projects or straight reverse-engineered copies of existing software. Meanwhile, the big companies will have to respond. Lower the walls. Back off the yearly increases and the fine print. Remember when these CAD products were run by architects and engineers who used them every day? Bring more of that back.
I think design software will look very different in 12 to 18 months. Any company that thinks its install base keeps it safe could be in for a terrible surprise. There are a lot of smart people inside and outside the big software companies. Let the competition push all of them. Customers end up with better tools either way.
I want design software that lets people focus on design, not license math, from a vendor that acts like a partner. Whoever delivers that, incumbent or startup, I hope you succeed. And I hope you don’t forget your users once you do.
I’m rooting for customers, users, and innovation!
Cheers,
Shaan
Sources
- CADCraft on GitHub, its roadmap, and its agent rules
- Martyn Day on LinkedIn: ArtCraft’s CADCraft
- Digital Engineering: Autodesk takes ZWCAD to court
- Schnitger Corp: Autodesk and ZWSoft settle IP suit
- Tom’s Hardware: Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Office replications
- PetaPixel: Someone rebuilt free, open-source versions of Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom using AI
- FourWeekMBA: Adobe clones built with Claude pass 86,000 GitHub stars
- Reddit r/ClaudeAI discussion on the Adobe clones
- NVIDIA-Omniverse/usd-brep on GitHub
- DEVELOP3D: Nvidia launches USD BRep geometry kernel for solid modelling
- CloudNavi: NVIDIA open-sources the SMLib CAD kernel under Apache 2.0
- Satyajit Ghana: usd-brep, a million-line NURBS kernel with a USD schema on top
- Gadget Pilipinas: ArtCraft is rewriting the search for Adobe alternatives
- TweakTown: Developer says software is over after using AI to recreate Adobe’s Creative Cloud
