Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
I don’t think this is going to amount to anything; the rate he’s popping these out suggest he’s more motivated by making a point and/or prestige than getting something useful at the end, and turning these enormous codebases nobody has any intuition for into something maintainable is going to be grueling work that will make them wish they started from scratch. But if we imagine that this will go somewhere:
Wouldn’t that be bad for open source in the long run?
Businesses, certainly not the larger ones, are not going to touch this for various reasons. So while Adobe and Microsoft may take a hit, it’s not going to fundamentally harm their business models. Students, on the other hand, can’t afford the real thing. If that leads to them to alternatives like LibreOffice, GIMP, or Krita, then when they end up in the workforce, there’s going to be at least some pressure to let them use the tools they’re used to. In fact, I use LibreOffice at work. But if they can have something that looks and feels exactly like Adobe’s and Microsoft’s products, they’ll feel right at home with the real thing at work.
As many free alternatives as there were before the rampant vibecoding, it seems that this growing collection of tools is not only functional, but a message to the large companies as well. 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.
Blood in the water for Adobe. Acrobat is a steaming pile of garbage. My org worked with their engineering team to track down a bug that we reported. They affirmed the bug (app hangs on launch) and then took four to five months fixing it.
I’ve worked in software engineering. I know that debugging, patching, testing, verifying is difficult. But the enterprise license costs a lot and that was a very long time with a crippling bug. The only satisfactory answer (to me) is that they don’t feel urgency because they are entrenched without real competition. They need to wake up.
(No, I don’t think vibe-coded Acrobat replacements will unseat them. I think LLM-powered real devs will come for them because the moat is smaller.)
The only satisfactory answer (to me) is that they don’t feel urgency because they are entrenched without real competition.
It’s where the lines intersects with how much it would cost to fix it and how significantly the bug impacts their revenue.
Yeah man but did you see the “Turn it into a podcast” button??? Great stuff!
Situation sucks because I would use Libreoffice if the UX wasn’t some dogshit pooped out by a backend FOSS guy in his sleep
Seems fine to me. I have no issue with it. Seems the same as everything else really. I go from docs, to word, to writer and it makes no difference. Or calc, cells, and excel. Whatever.
Do you often struggle with numbers and letters?
Creatorinstructor
Hmm, I see what you are going for but is “instructor” the proper term? To cut AI out of the picture, let’s say the guy instead of paying for tokens paid a team of developers who did the work for him. What would you call the guy then? He does exactly the same amount and type of work in both cases, but obviously noone would call him “instructor”.
That’s called hiring a team of developers. I believe this would fall under the term producer depending on the situation? If he paid a team of developers and claimed he coded it himself then he’d be called a liar
might be slop, but it is a solution. i know not stomping on the little indie projects like gimp is the perfect way, i know governments should follow germany and ditch microsoft, but here we are. code probably can be untangeld, and implemented to other projects as well, so the ui might feel familiar, and compatible with every format.
we all know well that most of the time a designer has to send the psd file, and i know many controllers at finance that need their macros which wont work in other excels.
None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline
Exactly. If I needed something more powerful than google docs then I’d download LibreOffice.
True. I think it’s greater value is being an AI middle finger to specific proprietary software. Especially if they incorporate and mainly focus on AI these days. As well as encourage it’s use as a magical new tool.
Anything with AI in it gets clicks.
most people do not even know that they exist to begin with.
Where’s the legal limit?
If I use AI to make and sell a Ford truck, will Ford sue and we can get precedent that AI use is still a copyright violation?
AI itself is theft
Only 99% of the time.
It’s possible to build models on only copyleft data, and include all relevant attribution
You wouldn’t download a car?
I have and I will
Just brand it fjord
“creator” my ass
I think (from a layman’s perspective) that these would have far more potential if they didn’t fully commit to the “100% from scratch reimplementation in Rust, btw” bit. Especially for this Office suite, where a wealth of options already exist that they could build upon (LibreOffice, OnlyOffice/EuroOffice, Collabora Desktop) for more proven support of these formats.
That said, I hope they decide to vibe clone Clip Studio Paint someday, then there’d finally be an open-source tool that can open .clip files. And maybe that could even allow someone else to implement the format in Krita, GIMP and the like
Why doesn’t the dev rather work on specific features sets on one existing project instead of building half baked fleet of slop.
Yeah, ArtCraft is very poorly made. It’s a bunch of AI tools jumbled together and is basic at best. It also buys into the entire Tech feudalism bullshit by being a cloud service.
If this came to parity with any of the billion dollar apps it’s trying to replace we would have new laws banning it somehow within a month
If it comes at parity and businesses start using it, then not only it would be banned but also the dev will be sued to hell for “infringing” their “patents” and “revenue loss” caused because of it.
No business would ever use these due to the license nightmare these projects would create.
You don’t know Indian small-mid businesses lol. They already pirate a lot of stuff. Adobe and Corel are very strict here—if they find out you are using an unlicensed version of their software, they send legal notices to pay a shit ton for the damages and buy the licensed one for a lock-in period before even suing. Most, if not all, give in because there is no way out of this. Yet a lot of them are willing to take this risk as the potential savings are much higher than the losses if caught.
If these businesses get a grey zone free product, they will happily switch. Big corpos will mostly not.
FOSS clones for software just to work on closed overengineered standards is stupid. We have had markdown for decades but still prefer oblong zip-xml files for writing rich text and slides!? Absurd.
Excel is the only MS Office product that makes sense to exist, and thus carries the brand to dominance largely by itself. Docs and slides have already been solved; I wish devs just focused on making the perfect Excel clone and abandon looking at all other MSOffice programs.
Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don’t think some slop apps are going to change that.
I’m a Microsoft hater but I don’t think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?
Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.
Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn’t want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.
These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don’t work with the file formats required, or they just don’t cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they’re great, I love them. However, I’m not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.
Pirating Adobe and MS products is a practice of Nerds which thought they were hackers, since the existence of alternatives which make useless the piracy of this products.
I don’t know where you got that idea. The vast majority of people I knew who passed around a copy of Adobe stuff or MS Office, along with a working key or keygen program back in the day, were most definitely not nerds who believed they were hackers.
I still use my copy of photoshop from time to time.
Photopea has been my go to alternative for opening actual psd docs for a while.
Paint.net was my go to for quick stuff back in windows. I’ve been learning Kirta on linux now.
But for certain work, the 10 year old copy of photoshop is still better at certain things. Specifically for editing actual photos (go figure).
We still don’t have a good alternative for prepress production media. I’ve seen some workarounds, but Adobe is the only actively developed option feature complete for this use case. Mostly because the chances that prepress workers and offset printer operators are also FOSS fiends and developers abysmally low. Prepress is such a small industry too since most people don’t really care if their print media looks like shit
30 years after switching to Linux, I still have to use Photoshop because the gimp is still trash.
I played with PhotoCraft, it launches on less than a second, and while still missing features and isn’t even a 1.0 release yet, it’s better than the gimp already.
And it opened all my psds perfectly.
I know it is aimed at digital artists but I highly recommend Krita as a photo editing alternative. Even with it not being the primary focus it knocks all the socks off Gimp. Unsure of psd support though!
Massive nothing burger, those sloppy clones are fucking terrible in production, and dont believe me, look it up yourself.
Id love for it to be really of substantial value as it is now though.
It’s funny, but we’ve had LibreOffice for years. I’ll take the human made one, thanks.
But continue making the unaccountable Epstein class uncomfortable. Autodesk next, yes please. I’ll still use FreeCAD but boy is it quirky lol.
Freecad doesn’t click with me so I’ll be so excited for an autocad-like project
LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations
He already released cadcraft, I haven’t tried it yet
CADCraft appears to only be 2D CAD.
Lots of anti-AI sentiments in here and I get that, but I’d like to discuss the implications here, cause this is actually somewhat revolutionary.
If I can just take any software and reverse-engineer it or recreate it to a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the original (not saying it really is in this case, but for the sake of discussion) and I then have copyright over that copy, doesn’t that turn things on it’s head? Doesn’t that make software essentially worthless? Any software you sell someone, they can recreate and distribute for free, legally (presumably). I suppose we’ve yet to see if this will really turn out to be legal, but it’s hard to argue how this is illegal, I would say - how is this different than a human closely studying Microsoft Word and “simply” writing their own version of the same program?
I’m not sure if this is good or bad honestly, but it sure is interesting. Anyone else have thoughts around how this affects the worth of software?
Doesn’t that make software essentially worthless?
Closed source will be worthless. Open source has already been out in the open and has been amazing. All software will become what it should have been all along and like Stalman wanted it, free and open source.
I hope you’re right! Not that I think anyone can predict where this will lead at this time.
I’m an IP attorney. You don’t have copyright over the thing you created with AI as you describe it. Copyright applies only to a minimally original expression by a human at this time.
But that only strengthens the argument that software is worthless now - I can copy existing software with AI and it is public domain basically is what you’re saying? So again, I can make a copy and legally distribute it. How can anyone earn money on software in that world?
People have been earning money on free and open source software for decades. Vibecoding is still a ton of work and not everyone has the time or the capacity to do it. Also, add the sentimental element too. Some people still support others even though the can make the same software.
AI isn’t revolutionary. It’s theft.
ArtCraft isn’t a Photshop clone in any sense of the word and it looks like no onr actually tried it. It’s a bunch of cobbled together AI tools. “Photoshop” is nothibg but AI prompted image generation and in-painting with Nano Banana (or other providers). It’s not reverse engineered photoshop. I spent parts of saturday getting it to work on local modals using Claude like apparently God intended, since I was pissed off that it was a rented service like everthing else in this fucking shit industry.
ArtCraft is an obviously hastily made piece of software that is intended to take Adobe Creative Cloud customers over to their cloud service.
If you want a Photoshop alternative you have Gimp and Krita. Those are well made pieces of software that isn’t vibe coded over a weekend.
In broad terms this is already covered.
If you made an exact clone of Photoshop by hand you’d get sued into oblivion, and that would be effective because of the barrier to entry ( in time and resources ) you’d need to get to that point.
Meaning you’d be betting all that upfront effort/resource on the a major corporation either not caring, or not being able to mount a reasonable litigation strategy.
Not many actors would be willing to risk that.
The difference here is that the barrier is now much lower and it tangles up a whole bunch of other potential issues around the legality of vibe code.
Regardless of how it shakes out it will almost certainly be a set of rules that only really apply to the peasants.
"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.”
If you made an exact clone of Photoshop
Yes but you wouldn’t actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn’t get sued? And I think in this case, it is definitely sufficiently different, it’s a completely different tech stack and while the UI is similar, it’s probably not identical (I haven’t checked though). But also you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
Also worth remembering that different countries may have different stances on this. I’m curious how the EU might handle it.
Yes but you wouldn’t actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn’t get sued?
Are you confident enough to bet 6-12 months of dev time and resources(possibly lawyer consultation fees) on that assumption ? because up until recently that’s what someone would need to do to find out.
It might be fine, but the threat of litigation is a part of the deterrent.
But also you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
As with all of these things, it’s region specific.
However, game mechanic patents and copyrights exists and are litigated regularly.
you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
It’s not just copyright. There are also patents to worry about. Those cover a specific process, like “click here, and the code selects all regions matching the same color (±5%)”. If you make an exact copy, surely you’ve violated some patents.
Sure, patent protections don’t last as long as copyright, and they can be defeated if you prove that it’s “obvious” or can show prior art, but it’s still an expensive legal battle against a megacorp. A vibe coder will likely fold at the first cease and desist.
There may never be a need to challenge Adobe’s patent lawyers in court.
This person used AI to clone commercial software, and then released the cloned software. Imagine instead someone developed an AI that could clone most commercial software…and then they simply published the AI open source. Now, anyone can download a tool that can clone software like Photoshop. They can clone Photoshop on their own computer, and that cloned copy never needs to be distributed anywhere.
Imagine Adobe trying to go after people that did that. It would be like trying to go after people that violate a patent for some device that they build in their garage, only use personally, and never sell. Could you in theory go after home tinkerers for patent infringement? Sure. But in practice it’s impossible to do at scale. Adobe will never even be able to find the people to sue.
I do think some implications not many people think about is how companies will combat this. Of course there’s copyright and patents, though I’m not sure how all that will pan out.
A more impactful implication, in my mind, is this will create a larger push to move applications and/or games to be online only and not distribute any version of the application; since, as far what I can imagine, that is the best and potentially only way to combat this. Just don’t give people the compiled programs. Which sucks.
This largely stemmed from modding games together and expanding the capabilities of modding, but I think this may seriously harm modding by preventing it from even happening on new games, which does scare me as a modder.
Granted, we sorta had this already - many Godot and Unity games were relatively easy to decompile, and many popular games are still released using those engines. Though, most, if not all, triple A games have moved away from Unity, if there even were that many to begin with. And that may be because of the fact that Unity games are easy to decompile.
This is all guessing, but I do suspect you’ll see the largest impacts of this in triple A games and large consumer-oriented software; commercial-only software may not see as much impact due to security, liability, and licensing implications of using (potentially unsupported) clones.
I think this may seriously harm modding by preventing it from even happening on new games, which does scare me as a modder.
I did think about games too and I was about to use it as an example, but as software, I think games are actually much harder to legally copy and distribute, because so much of a game is its art assets. Sure you can copy the software no problem, but you can’t really copy the artistic expression of the game. You can’t copy Hades and keep the great illustrations and animations. You couldn’t keep the music or voice acting. All of that would be copyright infringement.
So games are actually somewhat legally protected still, I’d say, basically because they contain much more art and creativity than most other programs.
Hmmm… So if someone used CoPilot, which is owned and operated by Microsoft, to copy something Microsoft owns, like Office, does that mean that no copyright infringement actually occurred, because Microsoft can’t infringe on their own copyright?
It seems there may even be an argument that an agent of Microsoft willingly released that code.
You don’t even need to use Microsoft’s AI, you can use any AI you want that is capable enough for the task.
From a technical perspective, yes. I was looking at it from an angle where the company has released their own code via an agent they control. Sort of like calling Microsoft support and asking “hey, can you send me the source code for Office please?”
Yes. It makes software worthless. People doubt these things but it’s done and set in stone already.
