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Comment by larodi | Hacker News Reader

People don’t get the super high value proposition in having these all *Craft packages controlled (automated) by AI. Most of the companies who are the kingmakers in the given area, do not allow it easily or are hard to integrate (costly) with, or did allow back in time and don’t now.

Given much can be automated in 2026, these (promoted goodies) may come as the missing link in innumerable automation chains, and particularly where commercial agents aim for when they sell costly licensing.

It also indirectly fights piracy and the risks which come with pirated copies (sidelined with funny stuff).

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this stuff is a game changer for implementing workflows with some user-facing interaction. I was working on a desktop publishing webapp with a specific slant, the previous iteration of the graphical editor UI was not very good, in order to build anything you have to specifically instruct the agent how every little interaction works, and my recollection and description was often different from how the "standard" desktop publishing flow works (i.e.: this is the sequence of actions to expand a selected entity preserving the aspect ratio, here's how to preserve the center-point, here's how to multi-select, etc). I told the agent "take the frontend from vectorcraft, adopt this specific subset of tools, build it for wasm, and plug in my agent tools and storage backend" - and within a day of deciding to adopt it, I had a much higher quality editor interface that anyone with desktop publishing experience will immediately know how to use, plugged into my storage format.

This is indeed the most exciting thing. It feels a bit scary how good the frontier models are at creating stuff with these apps (that are like a few days old and very incomplete pre alpha stage yet already somewhat functional). The future is happening and I just spent a day rethinking my whole life.

There's also the side effect that, just like with Libreoffice, they will be integrated into future harnesses for AI by anthropic and openai and others so that their platforms will be able to run these programs locally and spit out the results.

yes, and you can do alike. no need to wait for big boys to integrate this stuff. but the game changer is that few years ago one had to comply with weird Python 2.x running within Blender/Scribus/QGIS/etc. and most of the times only some of the functionalities are properly wired/exposed. the actual promise of these packages would be to be able to fully script the whole thing, and this is something that people behind ArtCraft should look into - expose the Rust magic to some common automation layer.

In all honesty - COM+ is a very smart thing, sadly not everyone understood it, and most new software packages are cloud-native before all else and dont' have it. Using the integrated (internal) scripting layers is not always so easy. But what does even 'easy' mean in 2026 automated coding. It was hard 5 years ago and 9 years ago when I last did such automations, nowadays this all has a very different perspective.

And let me remind you - there are dozens of "background removal" websites, and many of them are profitable. So you can imagine the level of comprehension for technology the general population has (at this moment, perhaps will advance rapidly also).

all the artcraft apps have mcp servers that are just a port on your local machine with an api so theyre very scriptable. Ive been doing a ton with them to test them out, including with deterministic scripts driving them

Oh my God you are right.

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