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.
Man, imagine the financial crisis vibe-coded Excel usage will cause.
I got Ai to make me the starting of a color correction program for Ubuntu /Debian. It’s supposed to be like the Intel color manager.
I have 0% coding skills so if anyone wants to finish it, go for it. Linux could use punchier colors.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ace0e29-f250-83ea-9573-66c41301f177?ogimg=plain
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?
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.
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 pad file, and i know many controllers at finance that need their macros which wont work in other excels.
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!
Where’s the legal limit?
If I use AI to make and sell a Ford truck, will Ford sue and we can get precinct 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
Just brand it fjord
You wouldn’t download a car?
I have and I will
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
That’s called hiring a team of developers.
Yeah, and this is called “prompting some vibe coded software”, but we are looking a single word title that applies to such a person. “Producer” makes sense I guess, but did he really “produce” it or did he just tell someone or something to produce it?
“creator” my ass
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.
Has anyone actualy tried this slop stuff? Does it even work?
Tried the PowerPoint clone. Opened our corporate template and hit present. Presentation mode runs sluggish as hell. OnlyOffice is way smoother by comparison.
Uninstalled it right away.
Narrator: uninstall didn’t fully work, and he’s now infected forever
Yea performance is probably the Achilles’ heel of ai slop in general. Interesting
Good software doesn’t grow on AI. He’s going to maintain all this, and keep up rapport before people even want to trust it. Even then, most professionals don’t learn on 3rd party stuff cause that detracts from the process itself. Adobe isn’t standard because it’s expensive or even well made, it’s because everyone uses it. This guy’s stuff it a toy, it probably “works” but I doubt it’s making anyone any money.
True, true, it probably won’t ever go anywhere near mainstream. But hey if it helps a guy on a budget, keep track of some stuff on a spreadsheet, without usingn word, I’m all for it.
Tho I wouldn’t trust ai slop with important data…
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.
Looking forward for the coming months to see if any of these programs can have all the bugs ironed out
Spoiler alert: They won’t.
