Developer Behind Free Adobe Clones Now Takes Aim at Microsoft Office
Open-Source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Replications
Brandon Thomas, creator of the open-source ArtCraft suite that replicates Adobe apps for free, has unveiled GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft—open-source replacements for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, built with Claude. The tools are available on GitHub, and Thomas hints that Autodesk and other subscription-based services could be next.
It's a protest now.
- variety8675
The media response to this omits the fact that these vibe coded "reverse engineered" apps hardly work and we've had open source alternatives to the Microsoft and Adobe products for years. The narrative they're pushing is a frontier model can make a perfect clone of any app, and the reality is it makes a ui that looks somewhat similar but none of the functionality actually works.
- sega_sai
I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice.
I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.
- eviks
> Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cuts
Has the author even opened the apps, let alone tried to use them?
> GridCraft on getartcraft.com
> WordCraft on getartcraft.com
> 404 This page could not be found
(though, "to be fair", not existing is "far from what they intend to replace")
- dariosalvi78
I've been thinking about this these days, this is the final revenge of open source. After having ingurgitated all the open source projects there exist in the world, AI is making basically all software un-copyrighteable (yes, you can't copyright a picture made by AI as you can't copyright a piece of software made -entirely- by AI).
- giancarlostoro
Yep, I realized this back in February, you can remake basically anything in a drastically shorter span of time with a single frontier model and patience and test thoroughly.