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Brandon ThomasandClaude Opus 5.5
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Progress docs per craftrules standards/progress-docs.md: target-app parity, gaps, roadmap with alpha gate, readiness by audience (full / mainstream / essentials) with Opus 5.5 hours, and feature, format, hardware, UI and localization parity docs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
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Gaps
Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-10 · Change: major (moved from the ROADMAP's "Where we're lacking", re-ranked, added file-format, stability, hardware, localization, ecosystem and AI gaps) · Target: Adobe Illustrator 2026 (30.x)
Every known shortfall against Illustrator, one entry each, ranked by how much it stops a professional from switching. This is the work list: unless you were given a task, pick the highest-ranked gap you can make progress on, write a plan, and update the entry (and target-app-parity.md) in the same PR.
Gap ids are stable (PRs say "Part of gap 2"); the rank can change. Hours are Opus 5.5 agent wall-clock hours for one agent, estimated unless marked; calibration in target-app-parity.md. Beta marks the gaps that must close before the beta stage (ROADMAP.md).
Ranked
Alpha blockers: none. Every core workflow passes the alpha gate; G9 is the only partial one, and it blocks beta, not alpha.
To beta: G1, G9, G10, G11, G12, the corpus and QA part of G8, the type-core part of G4, macOS pen pressure from G14 and the budget run of G15: ~170–270 h one agent, ~50–80 h wall clock with 4–6 agents.
G1 Interaction fidelity
- Missing: a tool-by-tool, panel-by-panel pass over modifiers, cursors, the Properties panel per context, isolation mode and small behaviours, against the public tool and shortcut documentation. Itemized in ui-parity.md. The Shaper's construction-mode widget and gesture refinements remain.
- Evidence: no side-by-side session has ever happened (the clean-room rule forbids running Illustrator, so the pass works from the documentation); users keep reporting small differences: #991, #975, #973, #955, #908.
- Impact: a power user notices this in the first minutes and stops trusting the tool.
- Estimate: 60–90 h; splits well by tool across agents.
G9 Illustrator .ai and EPS files from real users
- Missing: faithful layer and group structure from the editing data in real files (#951: 109 layers instead
of 14; #868: round trip with Illustrator 2018 loses layers and groups), guides and non-printing construction
lines (#779), open speed on large files (#758), legacy
.aiwithout the prolog, live effects, brushes, symbols and pattern fills as live objects (#637). Writing Illustrator's own editing data is out of scope (undocumented); Save As.aistays PDF-compatible. - Evidence: the issues above; 28 of the 350 issues are about
.ai/EPS (about 22 people, the most common single format theme), 20 fixed, and the 8 open ones are about structure (layers, guides, speed, live objects), not missing art. No real-file.aicorpus (users' files may be used locally, never committed). - Impact: blocks anyone who hands files back to Illustrator users. Opening and reworking their own archive works, with layer cleanup in some files. This is the main-format gap that keeps the stage at alpha.
- Estimate: 10–20 h with users' files to test against.
G10 Launch and stability on real machines
- Missing: the app not starting or staying in the background on some Windows 11 machines (#858, #964 fixed 2026-10-10, #620, #818), slow pointer on a Linux AppImage (#575), macOS paste from other apps (#954), a web-free crash/hang reporter, a field record.
- Evidence: open issues; the never-crash lints and
guardstop panics, not driver, windowing or packaging failures. - Impact: an app that doesn't start on someone's machine is 0% for them.
- Estimate: 20–35 h, needs reporters' help on hardware we don't have.
G8 Hardening at scale
- Missing: a corpus of real-world SVG/PDF/EPS files; more Affinity versions and platforms (51 pinned files now, including 28 original Affinity 3.2.3 feature probes; large interacting documents and complex typography missing); Windows, Linux and browser QA by hand; packaging polish (Homebrew cask #588, Flathub #554, update checks #615).
- Impact: unknown failures on users' files.
- Estimate: 30–50 h (the corpus and QA part blocks beta).
G11 Correctness bugs in core tools
- Missing: Shape Builder misses planar regions and targets whole shapes (#937, #893); Asset Export anti-aliasing ghost borders (#983); Transform effect dialog's invisible checkboxes and missing options (#885); PDF text boxes moving on open (#722); SVG units reverting to points (#864); bezier drag preview freezing (#834).
- Impact: wrong output in everyday work.
- Estimate: 8–15 h.
G4 Advanced type
- Missing: hyphenation and justification options, Optical Margin Alignment (type core); CJK vertical composition (ruby, mojikumi sets and dialog, proportional vertical metrics #966, kinsoku settings #633, manual tate-chu-yoko), Middle Eastern features beyond bidi, variable font axes, spell check with an open dictionary, Touch Type, Retype, Snap to Glyph. Itemized in type-parity.md.
- Impact: professional typography and Japanese/Chinese publishing.
- Estimate: 34–47 h (type core 14–19 h blocks beta).
G12 Preferences and panels that don't act yet
- Missing: ~17 Preferences options stored but not acted on (#394: Highlight Alternate Glyphs, Open Documents As Tabs, Real-time Drawing, hyphenation language, Appearance of Black, devices…), Properties panel per context, context menus beyond the canvas, Layers panel row menus and Collect for Export, SVG Interactivity.
- Impact: settings that silently do nothing erode trust.
- Estimate: 13–20 h.
G2 Photoshop-style raster effects and the Effect Gallery
- Missing: 37 of 57 filters (all of Artistic, Brush Strokes and Sketch), the Effect Gallery dialog, Load Texture for Glass and Texturizer, Smart Blur's Edge Only and Overlay Edge. Measured in effects-parity.md.
- Done: the pixel-filter pipeline and 20 filters (Blur, Distort, Pixelate, Sharpen, Stylize, Texture, Video), the last 13 on 2026-10-10.
- Estimate: 30–50 h (measured 0.7–1.2 h per filter); parallelizes well.
G13 Illustrator 2026 (30.x) additions
- Missing: gradient dither and perceptual blending, gradient presets (30.0); tangent and perpendicular snapping and the consolidated snapping options (30.0); artboard locking, artboard colours and managing artboards from the canvas (30.0); the Blend panel with ease in/out and separate colour acceleration (30.7); TIFF in Export for Screens (30.2); the Dimension tool (28.x).
- Evidence: Adobe's 30.0 and 30.7 release announcements, see target-app-parity.md.
- Estimate: 15–25 h.
G14 Pen hardware beyond Windows pressure
- Missing: pen pressure on macOS (#852) and Wayland (#491, #764) — winit 0.30 reports none there; tilt, bearing and barrel rotation for brushes (6D Art Pen, #372); the eraser end.
- Estimate: 8–16 h, partly waiting on winit 0.31; needs pen hardware to verify.
G5 Brushes, symbols and libraries
- Missing: the Art brush's Overlap, auto-generated Pattern brush corners, new tile art in Pattern Brush Options, the Key Color eyedropper; original brush, symbol and graphic-style libraries generated in code (never Adobe's); dynamic symbols; Start Global Edit.
- Estimate: 17–28 h.
G3 3D and Materials
- Done: an initial live Revolve in the
three-dcrate (#846, from the contributor who offered in #605). - Missing: Extrude & Bevel, Inflate and Rotate, caps, materials and better lighting, exact visibility for intersecting surfaces, 3D Classic, Turntable, 3D export (OBJ, USDA, glTF).
- Impact: specialist, but a visible menu of stubs.
- Estimate: 45–75 h, the largest single gap; plan in
plan/before coding.
G7 Views and windows
- Missing: multiple windows and Window › Arrange (Cascade, Tile, Float in Window, Consolidate All Windows), panels on another monitor, New View/Edit Views, global and video rulers.
- Estimate: 15–25 h.
G6 Automation and scripting
- Missing: a scripting surface over the command registry (Illustrator: JavaScript), Batch, image and graph variable kinds, dataset import/export. Actions, Variables (text and visibility) and full agent control over MCP are done.
- Estimate: 8–14 h.
G15 Performance budgets and a GPU renderer
- Missing: an idle-machine run of
vectorcraft-cli perf(last: 2026-10-01 on a loaded machine, 290 ms for a 50k-path fit against a 16 ms budget), fixes for any budget missed, dirty-region rendering, the GPU backend spike (M5). - Estimate: 15–25 h (the budget run and fixes block beta).
G16 Localization: the five missing key languages
- Missing: Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese catalogs; a right-to-left interface and interface shaping for Arabic and Devanagari; messages for Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese; native review of every catalog. Measured in localization-parity.md.
- Estimate: 70–110 h plus human review.
G17 Ecosystem: third-party plug-ins
- Missing: Illustrator's ecosystem is a C++ plug-in SDK and a large commercial plug-in market. VectorCraft has sandboxed WebAssembly plug-ins for object filters and live effects (plugins.md) and MCP; missing are tool plug-ins, panel plug-ins, a plug-in directory and any third-party plug-ins (#710).
- Estimate: 20–45 h for the APIs; the ecosystem itself isn't agent work.
G18 Generative AI features
- Missing: Text to Vector Graphic, Generative Recolor, Generative Shape Fill (#766), Generative Expand, Concept to Vector, Prompt to Edit, Rewrite Text. Adobe's run on its cloud models; ours would be a pluggable provider.
- Needs: an owner decision on models and providers.
- Estimate: 30–60 h after that decision.
G19 Accessibility
- Missing: AccessKit is on by default, so egui widgets reach screen readers, but custom panels, the canvas and its objects aren't described and nothing has been tested with VoiceOver, Narrator or Orca; keyboard-only canvas operation; high contrast. Illustrator's own accessibility is limited, so this is mostly beyond parity.
- Estimate: 15–25 h.
Revision history
| Date | Change | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-10 | minor | G3: initial Revolve landed (#846), 45–75 h left |
| 2026-10-10 | minor | G9 evidence counted from the tracker (28 .ai/EPS issues, 20 fixed); impact narrowed to handing files back |
| 2026-10-10 | minor | Alpha blockers checked against the core-workflow gate: none |
| 2026-10-10 | major | Moved from the ROADMAP's "Where we're lacking"; kept ids G1–G8, added G9–G19 (file formats, stability, bugs, preferences, 30.x additions, pen hardware, performance, localization, ecosystem, AI, accessibility) and re-ranked |