Brandon Thomas

Brandon Thomas is a software engineer and filmmaker based in Atlanta who founded and leads ArtCraft (formerly Storyteller), maker of the ArtCraft AI image and video app and the Crafting Apps, open-source Rust recreations of software from Adobe, Microsoft and others. He also created FakeYou, a website for generating AI voices and video that the company runs. He uses the name "echelon" on GitHub, X and Hacker News, and posts on Reddit as u/ai_art_is_art.

Career

Thomas worked as a software engineer at Square, now Block, Inc.. He describes himself as a "15-year industry veteran" who has written "six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day" as well as robotics and optics automation software, and says he has used Rust for about a decade. His X profile adds that he has had "an IPO exit" and has shot a dozen films; he describes himself as a filmmaker with more than ten years' experience.

In July 2020 he launched Vocodes, a neural text-to-speech website with dozens of celebrity voices that he described as a pandemic side project; it later moved to fakeyou.com. The company behind it, Storyteller, was founded in Atlanta in 2022 with Thomas as chief executive, according to its investor Pebblebed, and was later renamed ArtCraft.

ArtCraft and the Crafting Apps

Thomas began ArtCraft as a tool for composing AI-generated film shots, and its first public release came in July 2025. Ars Technica reported that he had coded exclusively with AI tools since February 2026. In October 2026 he announced the first Crafting Apps, including PhotoCraft, FilmCraft and LightCraft, on Reddit, saying he had written them with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5; his posts in the r/Adobe and r/creativecloud communities were removed, and Tom's Hardware later identified him as the poster. He said Adobe's subscription cancellation fee prompted the project, first promised "100% parity within a month" and later said it would take months rather than years. WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft and CADCraft followed within a week, and he has said he plans a SolidWorks equivalent.

Thomas has argued that AI lets developers build "1:1 functional equivalents, clean room" of paid software, writing that "software is over" and predicting that developers will "replace Google Search" and "build our own smartphones". When critics called the apps "vibecoded", he replied on X that he knows how to code.