Less than two weeks after shipping a free, open-source rebuild of Adobe’s creative suite, software engineer Brandon Thomas has set his sights on office software. His latest releases — WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft — replicate Word, Excel and PowerPoint as free, local applications written in Rust with substantial help from Anthropic’s Claude model. They open and save .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files, run natively on Windows, macOS and Linux and inside a browser, and ship under the permissive MIT or Apache-2.0 licences. They are also explicitly unfinished: the projects’ own repositories rate them between 50% and 60% ready for real work, and the published build is version 0.5.0 — alpha territory.
- Three new apps: WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft join the 13 applications grouped under Thomas’s Crafting Apps umbrella, which previously targeted Adobe-style creative tools.
- Partial compatibility: Native Office formats open and save and feature coverage is high, but pagination, file fidelity and legacy formats remain weak.
- Agent ready: Hundreds of ribbon actions are exposed through a CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, letting AI agents drive the apps.
- Not a Microsoft 365 replacement: These are local, open-source alphas, while Microsoft charges $99.99 a year for 365 Personal.
Broad coverage, shaky fidelity
WordCraft covers 88% of Word’s ribbon features, with styles, tables, track changes, footnotes, citations and mail merge already implemented, plus .odt, .rtf, .html, .md and .txt import and export and PDF output. Even so, its team estimates it is only about 60% of the way toward replacing Word for real work. Before a beta, the roadmap requires preserving charts and SmartArt on open and save and pulling pagination closer to Word’s.
GridCraft supports 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions, alongside dynamic arrays, pivot tables and charts. Readiness sits near 50%, and older .xls files open without formatting or embedded objects. Its README is blunt:
“The basic workflow works end to end, but the depth, fidelity and file compatibility are still rough.”
DeckCraft offers slide masters, themes, more than 150 vector shapes, transitions, animations and presenter view. Its repository puts it near 55% ready with roughly 84% feature coverage; figures circulating at launch were closer to 79%, and that number has moved since. All three sets of numbers are developer estimates rather than audited benchmarks, so the sensible approach is to test with copies of your own files and check page breaks, formulas, charts and animations before relying on the output.
Software written for machines to drive
The most distinctive design choice is not visual fidelity but automation. WordCraft exposes hundreds of commands to external agents — 389 per its website and 422 per its repository — through a command-line interface, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, while DeckCraft exceeds 200. In practice, nearly every ribbon button can be triggered by a script or an AI agent, so a model could build a chart or reformat a report without a mouse.
Thomas describes the work as a clean-room rebuild, written from public file-format specifications and observation of how the originals behave rather than from Microsoft’s code — the same legal route Compaq used to clone the IBM PC BIOS in the 1980s. The model involved was Claude Opus 5.5, priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Critics have dismissed the apps as “vibe coding” or “AI slop”, questioning how much code Thomas reviewed himself and whether one person can maintain a suite this size; he has publicly insisted he knows how to program. Attention has been significant regardless: WordCraft alone has drawn more than 12,000 GitHub stars.
A different league from Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is a subscription bundling cloud services, enterprise administration and decades of format work. The Crafting Apps are local, open-source alphas — closer in spirit to LibreOffice. The historical comparison is instructive: OpenOffice.org appeared in October 2000 when Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice source code, and LibreOffice forked from it in 2010. Both took years of effort by large communities, while Thomas shipped three office clones less than two weeks after his Adobe duplicates.
He is not fond of the incumbent free option either. “I hate LibreOffice. It once destroyed a 40-page assignment of mine the week it was due, during exam season,” he wrote on social media. His commercial model sits elsewhere: ArtCraft’s AI image and video studio carries paid plans starting at $10 per month, while the office applications cost nothing.
The real question is not whether WordCraft will retire Word — it will not, not soon. It is how quickly a single developer backed by an AI model can produce applications that already open and save Office formats, are agent-addressable and carry a permissive licence. If that pace holds, the moat around productivity suites stops being code and becomes format fidelity, support and trust. Maintenance remains the unresolved part: someone has to fix a client’s corrupted document at eleven at night. For experimenting with agent workflows and editing simple files, these builds are worth a download. For the contract due tomorrow, they are not there yet.