I Automated Vibe-Coded Adobe Photoshop with Claude Code!

0:00So, um, this thumbnail, I didn't open Photoshop for it. I typed one sentence into Claude code, and Claude built it layer by layer inside an app that didn't exist 2 weeks ago. It's called Photoscape, and I think it's kind of a big deal. Photoscape is an open-source rebuild of Adobe Photoshop written from scratch in Rust. The ArtCraft team made the first commit on September 30th. 10 days later, it has more than 40,000 stars on GitHub, almost 6,000 forks, and its releases have been downloaded about

0:30600,000 times. Now, look at the commits. Out of about 1,200, more than 700 list Claude Opus 5.5 as a co-author. So, yeah, [music] a big chunk of this was vibe coded. It's almost 400,000 lines of Rust with thousands of tests, [music] and every one of Photoshop's 627 menu items is wired to a command. Their own docs say that number only counts the

0:54wiring, not how well each one works. [music] They reverse-engineered it the clean room way, working only from specs and from watching how Photoshop behaves. It opens real PSD files, [music] and when you save one back out, 307 of their 309 test files look the same. To be fair, their own readme calls it early alpha, and says it's not a Photoshop

1:15replacement for pro work yet. [music] There's no generative fill, and about 20 tools are still missing. But, um, it's free, it runs offline, and the license lets you do pretty much anything with it. Every menu item, every tool, every dialog in Photoscape is a command. My copy listed 817 of them. The buttons call those commands, the command line tool calls them, and so does an MCP server. So, anything you can click an AI

1:40agent can do, too. So, let's hook it up. On a Mac, the app download doesn't include the command line tool. That's a separate zip on the releases page. I had version 0.5 of the app, so Claude grabbed the matching CLI, checked it against the releases checksum file, and unzipped it. Then, it added two MCP servers. The first one runs Photo Craft Headless with one folder it's allowed to read and write. The second one is the fun one. It bridges into the real app that's open on your screen. You start Photo Craft with a control port and a token file. And uh now Claude can see the canvas and drive it live. One

2:15[music] catch. New MCP tools only show up when a new Claude code session starts. Instead of making me restart, Claude wrote a tiny client about 100 lines that talks to the same server directly. Both servers came back connected. Then the actual prompt. [music] Install the MCP and create a thumbnail there. That's all I typed. Claude looked at the video I was working on, LGTM, a little music video about an AI that approves everything, [music] and picked a dark look with neon green to

2:42match it. On the right is the real app. Keep an eye on the layers panel. A background, a green glow, server racks, red and amber lights, and then a flame filter which uh Photo Craft actually has running along a path at the bottom. Then a robot um made of [music] shapes, a big LGTM stamp with an outer glow, and a pill that says merge to prod. The whole

3:04thing rebuilt in about 8 seconds. [music] Then Claude exported a preview [music] and uh looked at it the way a designer would. The vignette was centered on the canvas, [music] so the left half went muddy. The fire was too weak, and a little label was crashing into the robot's smile. [music] It fixed all three, tilted the stamp,

3:26and checked it again at phone size. [music] Compare that with an image model. With image generation, every change is a whole new picture. [music] Ask for one more line of text and the robot changes, the fire changes, the font [music] changes. Here, the AI is still making the image, but it makes it in layers. So when I said, "We need to add song by AI," Claude swapped [music] a tiny gray line for one new text layer, a song by AI with a music icon. Nothing else moved. When I said, "Add Claude instead of the robot." and dropped in this picture, Claude measured the pixel grid and rebuilt Claude as vector

4:02shapes. Only the robot layers changed, plus a few flames in front of Claude's feet. The stamp, the [music] fire, the text, all exactly the same. And because they're real layers, I can still hide the [music] fire, change the text, or move Claude myself. There's a PSD of every version, too, so nothing is stuck

4:19inside one flat image. [music] Okay, then I asked for something louder. "Make another version that's very eye-catching, YouTube-optimized, gets a lot of clicks." Claude went for a stage, an orange explosion, sunburst rays, a crowd, [music] a wall of fire, and Claude as a rockstar with pixel sunglasses and a mic. The first try had, um, a few problems. [music] The sunglasses were huge, the raised arms in the crowd looked like lollipops, and there were thin seams inside the mic. Claude caught each one in the preview, fixed it, and [music] rebuilt. Then I said, "I want two. This

4:55one and one more." So, version three is a giant green merge button, the [music] one every developer knows, with Claude stomping on it and a siren on its head. It says, "40,000 lines, zero reviews." [music] That one took two passes as well. The text was touching Claude's arm, um, the siren looked like a black helmet, [music] and the drop shadow had landed on the eyes instead of the body. That's 11 versions across three designs, and every one of them was built live in the app. It isn't perfect. Over the bridge, Photokraft won't place an image file, [music] and opening an SVG through the MCP failed on my version. So, Claude had to

5:36work around both. [music] Still, I now have a free, open-source Photoshop that Claude can drive layer by layer, and it's 10 days old. Um, I'm going to keep using it. And if you want to see this thumbnail out in the wild, it belongs to my previous video, the LGTM song. So, go check that one out. The links are in the

5:55description.