FOSS Fridays: $100 for Office? This Dev Vibe-Coded His Own With Claude and Said GG 💼

A developer who rebuilt Adobe's Creative Cloud suite for free using AI has released open-source clones of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, built with Anthropic's Claude and published on GitHub. Brandon Thomas, the engineer behind the ArtCraft project, released the new apps under the names WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0 so anyone can read, copy, modify or reuse the code, including commercially. The Office clones are written in Rust, a programming language prized for speed and memory safety, and run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD, as well as inside a web browser, from a single codebase.

Thomas described the project as a clean-room rebuild, meaning the applications were written from public file-format specifications and by observing the behavior of the originals, without copying Microsoft's code. The same legal approach was used by Compaq in the 1980s to clone IBM's PC BIOS. Earlier this month, Thomas drew attention with ArtCraft, a set of free apps mirroring Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Lightroom, built with Claude Opus 5.5 after Adobe charged him its cancellation fee one too many times.

WordCraft reads and writes .docx, Word's native file format, and covers 88% of the features in Word's ribbon interface. Track changes, footnotes, citations and mail merge are already supported, though the team estimates WordCraft is only about 60% of the way to replacing Word for real work when file fidelity and stability are counted. It remains labeled alpha, an early test version where bugs are expected. The reviewer noted the app is 91Mb, feels snappy and looks nearly identical to standard Microsoft Word, and said it could easily replace the premium suite for everyday office jobs.

GridCraft, the Excel clone, already handles 513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions, the formulas such as SUM or VLOOKUP that power spreadsheet calculations, plus 89% of its ribbon commands. The project lands amid a broader wave of AI-assisted software cloning that has seen a developer get GTA V running natively on an iPhone and modders dropping Minecraft creepers onto an Elden Ring boss, with a free tool that lets AI agents dissect almost any piece of software recently surging past 10,000 stars on GitHub. DeckCraft, the PowerPoint counterpart, rounds out the trio as Thomas continues expanding the open-source suite.