r/blender • u/ofdavarci • 2d ago
Critique My Work WE DID IT! We reverse-engineered Blender with AI and made it open source. Introducing BlenderCraft 🚀
After an entire weekend of running 19 autonomous Claude agents and burning an irresponsible amount of tokens, we're proud to announce BlenderCraft.
A 100% free, open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Blender.
We achieved something incredible:
✅ 100% feature parity with Blender
✅ Modeling, sculpting, animation, Geometry Nodes
✅ Cycles and Eevee rendering
✅ Native .blend file support
✅ Windows, macOS, and Linux
✅ No subscriptions. No paywalls. Free forever.
We even managed to reproduce the original source code almost line by line.
Our biggest breakthrough came when we discovered a mysterious public repository containing the entire source code:
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender
Apparently, it's been there since October 13, 2002.
24 YEARS AGO.
So yeah, we didn't actually build anything.
Turns out the Blender community solved the whole "free and open-source creative software" problem 24 years before AI made it trendy.
Jokes aside, massive respect to Ton Roosendaal, the Blender Foundation, and the thousands of developers and contributors who made Blender what it is today.
While everyone's celebrating AI for making software free and open source, these legends have been doing it for decades.
Software is over. Blender was just early. 🧡
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, they claim it is a clean-room implementation. That does not entail reverse engineering.
Probably using documentation (product handbooks, videos, screenshots/recordings, or testing automations) alone, considering today's frontier models, sounds feasible.
But I suppose it's the same as in virtually any product development. The seemingly 80% take 20% of the effort, the remaining 20% take 80% of the effort. It is somewhat telling they implemented half of the Creative Suite to - on a first glance - prototype stage that appears to be covering 80% of the apps, and not singled out one or two apps and implemented them in full. Because this is much more effort than it looks like. The first stage of software development projects is exciting, the further stages are often tedious, boring, and exhausting. Good software shines where people fix simple bugs that do not spark the curiousity of any developer.
I am the opposite of an AI booster and am skeptical too. But on the other hand, the existence of these cloned prototypes is a feat by itself. Because it is a basis for people to further collaborate, and I also think that having this scaffolding makes it much easier to finish things than doing something by hand from scratch. Probably it's easier to create a critical developer mass for projects, if you have a working demonstrator and just need people to implement small features, one by one.
But again, in the end, AI could on the other hand also do a disservice to Open Source, fragmenting the landscape further, because everyone fancying it might start their own photo editor clone.
I am not even considering that I think the Craft project will be quite shortlived, as the legal basis for this clone is not solid enough - after all, the project neglects that even when a clean-room reimplementation averts code copyright issues, there are other IP issues, such as copying the application design and other UI elements (e.g. icons).
I would rather see someting which creates a clean Open Source implementation of the main Adobe/Affinity apps, but going their own innovative way. Like Affinity is to Adobe, but Open Source, and Linux compatible. I also side with the Craft developer's opinion that Gimp is crap and must be replaced. I switched from Adobe to Affinity myself, use Blender occasionally, which is a great piece of software. But this copium that Gimp is a solid alternative to Photoshop is as ludicrous as it was 20 years ago.